Beginning here, I’ll be running what I’m going to call “Drive-In Summer”, where we focus on B-movies or films with a B-movie spirit. As part of that, every other week will be a Double Feature, with a second monster movie write-up on Friday. To fully embody the experience, go get a bag of the least healthy popcorn you can find.
The last Mexican creature feature from the sixties we discussed was the delightful Ship of Monsters, and The Brainiac (originally titled El Baron del Terror, or The Baron of Terror) is from around the same time period. It is, however, an altogether different beast—for one, it was actually seen outside its home country thanks to an English dub that was run on television. Interestingly, the producer of the movie, Abel Salazar, also stars as the titular Baroniac of Terror—that would usually be a bad sign, but not so much here. The creative heads of this movie had long and varied careers, but notable for us, Salazar had produced several monster movies, including the vampire flick El Vampiro in1957, while director Chano Urueta had helmed the Frankenstein-esque El Monstruo Resucitado in 1953, all of them considered part of the Golden Age of Mexican horror movies, which was built on homaging the style of classic Universal films of the thirties and forties—that is also quite evident in this movie, from the black-and-white photography to the booming score. Of course, it is made painfully clear at all times that The Brainiac did not have anywhere near the budget of those older movies—everything in this is an obvious studio set, some fairly detailed while others are just an image projected onto the background—but at times it more than makes up for it in strange B-movie energy.
The inspiration from Universal is quite apparent in the plot, based in ancient revenge and with a gentlemanly monster at its centre like Dracula or The Mummy, although it has some very Mexican specificity to it as well. Baron Vitelius d’Estera is pulled before the Inquisition in 1661 Mexico City in a long sequence where the hooded inquisitors read off his various crimes, which includes, among other things, witchcraft, “dogmatism”, “attempting to foretell the future using a corpse”, and sullying virginal women—they also recount their attempts to torture a confession out of the Baron, only for him to welcome it with open arms, which I guess spoils their fun. We watch Salazar as the Baron grinning his way through the whole thing, setting him up as one dude who just doesn’t give a care, a real black magic party dude. Maybe it’s just me, but having watched the dubbed version (although one scene present in the streaming version I watched was not dubbed, which was rather jarring—it’s a good thing it wasn’t vital to the plot or anything), I really did love the bombast of the English voice actor reading his way through this scene, giving what is otherwise several minutes of nothing much happening some real spirit. Only one man comes to the Baron’s defence (if there’s any reason for him to do it other than pure cronyism, I don’t know what it is—perhaps love?), and he is laughed out of the room and sentenced to two-hundred lashes just for trying—meanwhile, the Baron is sentenced to be publicly humiliated and then burned, to which he responds by going along with it cooperatively, except for the part where he magically puts his chains on two guards. Like I said, party dude.
As he burns wearing his 1661 Catholic dunce outfit, the Baron swears vengeance against the descendants of the members of the Inquisition—whose faces he/we can see through their masks with some compositing tricks—and uses his magic to send his soul(?) to a comet flying overhead, as seen with an image that looks like something from a Viewmaster. After a three-hundred year montage—all centuries portrayed by the same fun spooky font—we end up in the “modern day” of 1961, and as promised, the Baron does return alongside the still image of a comet (the moments of him appearing from the fallen space rock borrows more from the extraterrestrial films of the previous decade than the Universal ones.) Unexpectedly, he returns in the form of a bizarre entity blessed with a pulsating cranium, a forked tongue, two tube-shaped hands, and a thirst for brains—why did he take this monster form, specifically? Only the Baron can say. It does look more or less like a Halloween costume at the best of times, but I give it credit for its weird qualities. Lucky for him, a random guy is driving around the empty roads outside Mexico City and then gets out to investigate the mysterious falling star, so for his troubles he gets his brain sucked out and, as a final indignity, the Baron uses his magic to steal the guy’s clothes and assume human form.
The Baron’s methodology is, to be honest, a little unorthodox. After getting his fancy suit, he decides to wander around the streets and in a bar just as it’s closing, waiting for the right moment to suck out the brains of random people just for the fun of it. As we learned from the Inquisition, he is a bit of a Lothario, which in these cases manifests in him staring intensely at women and saying little, and them immediately falling for him while simultaneously questioning his demeanour and excusing it. He possesses a form of mesmerism that takes the form of someone shining a flashlight on his unblinking face, but in these early scenes that’s not entirely clear, making them all the stranger. As you could guess, a number of elements here, including the Baron’s aristocratic air and snazzy suits, and the way the brain-eating is shot, is very Dracula-esque. In general, he sometimes doesn’t seem entirely devoted to not being conspicuous—when he first meets our two bland heroes, a couple of assistant astronomers following the trajectory of the comet (one is played by Ariadne Welter, who had starred in Salazar’s El Vampiro) to the outskirts, his explanation amounts to “just going for a night walk in the middle of nowhere, nothing weird about that.” After using his magic to rob a bank, he can afford both a mansion and a butler, and enacts his plan by hitting the books at the local archive/Inquisitor’s tomb, finding all his persecutors’ bloodlines (it’s a good thing those families both stuck around and didn’t change any of their surnames), and then inviting them all to a party, where he is such a good host that they all immediately invite him to their homes/weddings/jobs, although he sometimes has to slip away to go to his hidden collection of brains in a large goblet for a nibble. So, wait, he isn’t actually eating their brains when he sucks them out? The rules for brain-eating black magic demons are pretty arcane, as I’ve come to learn.
He subsequently begins murdering those people during their get-togethers, a rapid fire series of scenes in the second half that mostly play out exactly the same, but have enough little weird details to make them not feel repetitive. Rather hilariously, the local historian (played by German Robles, star of El Vampiro) points out that the Baron’s name is the same as someone in his Inquisition records (after implying that he regards the Inquisition as a little backwards from his modern vantage point)—the Baron didn’t even bother to come up with a new name when he reappeared! Like I said, not trying very hard. In that scene, the Baron uses his magic powers to get some action from the historian’s adult daughter before getting to the brain-sucking, which he also does with the wife of an industrialist (he promises to help him develop a new type of metal beforehand), really playing up the reputation he had back in 1661, and maybe going slightly farther than the more implied sexuality of the Universal monster movies. During the historian murder, he also spends some time in monster form throwing papers around and just making a mess before he gets to the part where he burns all the documents with his name on it, something that would not be a problem if he had just come up with a different name. Maybe he just wanted his life stricken from the record in general?
While all this is happening, two bumbling detectives keep finding bodies with their brains missing, and for a long time they seem to think that the perpetrator is doing this in order to silence people who witness his robberies—this theory doesn’t sound the least bit strange to them, apparently. They even get hired by the Baron to act as security at his party, but they don’t suspect this guy who just showed up in town out of nowhere and was the only one to have personally interacted with all the people who then start dying in mysterious circumstances (they even interview him at one point during those investigations) until they talk to an archivist and visit the tombs themselves. Our two astronomers also begin to suspect some things after multiple scenes of them reading about the deaths in the newspaper, while their boss at the observatory is gradually driven insane by the mystery of the disappearing comet, spending night after fruitless night trying to figure out what happened. An interesting twist is that the male lead is the descendant of the man who had defended the Baron in 1661, but this only barely plays into the finale. What does play into the finale are two big honkin’ flamethrowers wielded by the two detectives—I guess fire is the Baron’s weakness, as it is for most of us—and they somehow manage to incinerate him without his whole mansion burning down. Now there’s a magic trick!
You can probably tell that this is a fairly silly movie—but to be fair, so were many of the Universal movies, sometimes intentionally so. It can’t really carry the Gothic weight of its inspiration for obvious financial reasons, but the fact that I could still discern the influence does show a level of commitment that is admirable. It is, at its heart, a throwback to much simpler horror movies that based themselves in inexplicable witchcraft and the idea of the past coming back to haunt us, contrasted with the modern scientific fears that were more prolific in the fifties, but it also has a rather unique makeshift monster at its core, played rather amusingly by Salazar, who can go from manipulative socialite to weirdo from scene to scene. It is a B-movie of its era, certainly, but one that seeks to emulate the tenor of a different one entirely.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 