Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Thanks for the memories!

Awesome Movie

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Terrible low budget science fiction/horror flick about alien parasites invading a small American town and taking over people's minds. A small band of brave uninfected individuals tries to stop their hostile take-over. Lousy story, boring execution and mostly non-existent visuals, courtesy of schlock production studio American International Pictures (AIP), specializing in only the cheapest of horror and science fiction flicks to provide drive-in theaters with content to show to teenagers who aren't watching anyway because they're engaged in other activities. Noted science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein sued the producers (including Roger Corman, an expert in producing this type of quick, cheesy, cheap cinema of the late fifties) for stealing the plot of his book 'The Puppet Masters'. Otherwise this movie is only noteworthy for featuring Leonard Nimoy (of Star Trek fame, obviously) in one of his earliest roles, playing the host to the Brain Eater Overlord: unfortunately his last name was misspelled as 'Nemoy'.

Were it not for the presence of two men who scored great success later on television, Ed Nelson on Peyton Place and Leonard Nimoy on Star Trek, The Brain Eaters would have no reason to be remembered. Then again with your half eaten cerebrum it would be impossible to remember this film anyway.It's not monsters from Outer Space, but a collective of Borg like parasites, speaking of Star Trek, from the Earth's core who've come to the surface in rural Illinois and start invading the populace of Riverdale. When they take over the police authority and cut communications from the outside, our intrepid heroes led by a US Senator of all things have to deal with them on their own.Ed Nelson and Leonard Nimoy play two of the scientists. But the saving grace of the film if it has any is the performance of Cornelius Keefe as the blustering United States Senator who is most aware of the prerogatives of his office and ain't gonna let no aliens, parasites, whatever stand in his way.Leonard Nimoy's name is misspelled in the credits and for reasons of posterity he probably considers it a blessing.

The Brain Eaters starts with the newly engaged Glenn Cameron (Alan Frost) driving his lucky fiancé Elaine (Jody Fair) to the small American town of Riverdale in Illinois to break the good news when they see a sudden bright flash. Glenn & Elaine stop to investigate & discover a large metal cone that's 50 feet tall by 50 feet across at it's widest. In Washington Senator Walter K. Powers (Cornelius Keefe as Jack Hill) takes full responsibility & flies out to Riverdale where he is met by Glenn who just happens to be the Mayor's (Orville Sherman) son, Glenn informs Senator Powers that his Father has mysteriously disappeared & there has been 3 unsolved murders in the area recently. Glenn takes Senator Powers to the cone where Dr. Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson), Dr. Wyler (David Hughes) & their assistant Alice Summers (Joanna Lee) are busy running all kinds of tests on the unidentified object. Kettering informs Senator Powers that he is baffled by the cone, eventually they all end up in the Mayor's office who has suddenly reappeared. After some macho rubbish between the Mayor & the Senator about who is in charge the Mayor pulls a gun out & makes a run for it but is shot by a cop. Kettering & a somewhat unemotional Glenn examine the body & discover two holes in the back of his neck. Kettering performs an autopsy & discovers that the Mayor was being controlled by an alien parasite previously unknown to man, Kettering puts two & two together & comes up with the startling theory that these parasites have come from the cone. But since the parasites got to the Mayor who else is being controlled? The mystery deepens even further when an expert in bio-chemistry , Professor Helsingman (Saul Bronson), who has been missing for the past five years turns up out of the blue. Kettering & his team face a race against time to stop the parasites before they take over the entire human race!Directed by Bruno VeSota The Brain Eaters is nothing to get excited about. The script by Gordon Urquhart supposedly based on Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters fails to make the most of it's obvious potential, the potential for paranoia is wasted. The film makes it perfectly clear who is controlled by a Brain Eater & who isn't. Film's like John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) & Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) brilliantly uses the mistrust between characters to heighten tension & make us, the viewer, question who we should believe & put our faith in. The Brain Eaters has none of this which hurts the film badly as it's very predictable & doesn't even attempt to try & pull any surprises. The dialogue is clunky, awkward, static & feels dated as is often the case with 50's Sci-Fi but there are a few laughs to be had if you listen closely enough. To give it some credit it moves along like a rocket, there's no boring exposition here even going as far as having a few scenes narrated rather than try & condense the information into an ordinary conversation & at only an hour long it doesn't outstay it's welcome. The Brain Eaters themselves are rarely seen & when they are they look like wigs with antenna's. There's no blood, gore or violence & the special effects are generally poor as you would expect. The acting is very wooden & everyone looks & sounds like they're reading their lines from cue cards, & yes Leonard Nimoy does make an appearance even if it's hard to make him out you'll definitely recognise his voice. Director VeSota fails to bring any scares, atmosphere, style or originality to the film as a whole. Overall I thought The Brain Eaters was an OK way to pass an hour but could have been more & at the end of the day fails to distinguish itself from any other 50's black & white Sci-Fi film of which there are many better ones available. One to watch only if your desperate.

I have seen The Brain Eaters a couple of times and is quite enjoyable, despite the low budget and reading some bad reviews about it. This movie was first released on video in the UK as part of the Drive-In Classics series, of which I own a copy. It has since been re-released on video and now DVD.A strange alien cone shaped craft of unexplained origin appears in the small town of Riverdale. Some scientists and government officials are sent to investigate the craft and at the same time, some of the local residents start acting strange and then die. All of the people who have died have bite marks on the back of their necks and it turns out these are the work of parasites from the cone. These turn out to be millions of year old aliens who want to rule the world and have been living underground all this time. Some of the people enter the cone and are attack by more parasites and are defeated in the end.The movie's cast is mostly made up of unknowns, although Ed Nelson has appeared in several drive-in movies of this kind including Attack Of the Crab Monsters and A Bucket Of Blood. Also look out for a then unknown Lenard Nimoy, some years before he played Mr Spock in Star Trek.This is a worth seeing, especially if you are a fan of 1950's science fiction like me.Rating: 3 stars out of 5.