Hair of the Dogmatizer: THE BRAINIAC (1962)

Thursday, February 03, 2022

Hair of the Dogmatizer: THE BRAINIAC (1962)

Night 13 of The 12 Days of Ed Wood:

I tried to watch the first episode HBO post-apocalyptic pandemic drama Station 11 last night and ended up locked in the bathroom in full anxiety attack mode, breathing erratically, trying not die from worrying about dying, the whole bit, all because of sound mixing. There needs to be new warning in addition to strobe lights for epileptics, sexual assault, drug use for parents, etc: 'vividly reproduced panic attack hearing distortion" for anxiety-sufferers. You know what I mean: a character has a panic attack and the sound mixing and acting, camera movement and music all work in a unison way too realistic not to entrain a reflexive panic attack from susceptible viewers (the voices suddenly grow faint, yet urgent, the sound of blood in your ears rushing). I suddenly remembered the feeling of early in March 2020, when I was loading up on peanut butter, dried rice and beans in anticipation of civilization's COVID collapse, suffering anxiety attacks every day, unable to breathe for fear of being unable to breathe. I'd forgotten that anxiety, until the first episode of Station 11 reproduced it so well it made me feel like I was a post-Jimmy Stewart looking down from Midge's step ladder and realizing I was--in some way--still clinging by my fingers to that high-up rooftop in Vertigo.

We never saw Jimmy rescued from that rooftop in the beginning did we? At the end, he's still up there. He's probably up there still.

That's where the glory of bad movies come in. For those of us so easily suggestible, those of who lose our shit just thinking about losing our shit, those of us easily triggered by the anxieties of our post-real age, watching our private nightmares played back for us in a tumble of cheap mummery provides a warm comforting gush of relief. We can breathe freely in the presence of recognized chicanery--exposing the absurdity of our fears in ways that actually lessen them. We can latch onto doddering Frank Morgan's lapel and hide behind his curtain as the big green Oz bellows and puffs. We're safe, with the winners. Isn't this the function of ceremonial demon masks and re-enactments of ancient god dramas, performed around the flickering flames in primitive societies? The outsider 'so bad it's good' horror movie achieves this same therapeutic function.

Lucky for me, and maybe you, the bizarro spirit of 'bad' moviedom lives beyond Wood, in rocky crevasses the world over, the equivalent of a "I do believe in spooks / I do believe in spooks" holy mantra coming like a last minute helicopter ladder out of the collapsing pyre. I'm finding new protective totems ever year. Some of which I'm sharing for the first time in this Ed Wood series. One I always knew about but never really fully embraced for its full anxiety-abating lunacy until lately: The Brainiac (the Mexican title: El Baron del Terror). It's this movie I turned to once the first Station 11 episode finally ended. And lo, it healed me. It dispelled the anxiety with a flicker of a long, brain-sucking straw/tongue

Intrigued? finish your pulque and come along with me down the rabbit hole of time and space to....

THE BRAINIAC

(1962) Dir. Chano Ureta

*/****

Actor Abel Salazar produced a web of 'great' weird and wondrous early-60s horror (and other) films in Mexico, but THE BRAINIAC (1962) is the only one that can be rightly placed next to the works of Bunuel and Jodorowsky in the zebra, shoehorn and xylophone-stuffed canals of Mexican cinematic surreality. Salazar himself--a kind of Mexican version of Sheldon Leonard--takes the title role and makes all the pretty girls kiss him (as Eric Schaffer or Paul Naschy would later do) as the irresistible Baron Vitelius d'Estera. Tried by a hooded tribunal for "dogmatizing" and seduction, he has nothing but a baleful stare and a lone friend's plea (rewarded with 50 lashes) for rebuttal. Tied to a big X, made pants-less in a pope hat, he glares as the inquisitors read their verdicts (and the ladies roll their eyes). After cursing his condemners out by name (seeing right through their black hoods), and making his chains disappear, our saucy Baron hitches a ride on a passing comet, leaving the pyre behind.

Three hundred years later, the comet returns and the baron drops out of the sky with a thud, right near an observatory where the chief astronomer will late exclaim: "comets can't just disappear!"

The plot itself is sparse and expects us to fill in a lot of blanks, presuming we've seen other films like it, so can piggyback on their set-ups. For example, there is no need to explain why the baron has returned from his 300 year round trip through the cosmos as a suction cup clawed, long-tongued, patchy-haired pointy nosed, brain-sucking alien shapeshifter, because similar things happened to los astronautos in a bunch of late-50s sci-fi B-films: First Man into Space (1959), Night of the Blood Beast (1958), and The Creeping Unknown (1955) all feature astronauts returning from orbit with some alien life merged into theirs, altering their appearance and appetites. So why bother explaining that something similar happened to our terrifying Baron Vitelius? By 1961, coming back from space merged with a vampiric space 'other' was as familiar as the "bends" or oxygen narcosis. The difference here is that he now eats brains instead of drinking blood. Otherwise writers Frederico Curiel and Adolfo López Portill just siphon out the plot points from those other films, as if making ghostly intertextual subliminal links,

On the Gothic horror side, Brainiac's plot leans on Bava's Black Sunday (for its witch burning prologue and descendant cursing) and of course, for a fusion of the two, there is Edgar Ulmer's Man from Planet X (for the weird noir-ish observatory / fog machine-and-rear projection soundstage noir isolation and omnipresent darkness.) Lastly, for the 'back from the great beyond to wreak vengeance on those who sentenced me to death, one-by-one' plots we have everything from that spate of late-30s/early-40s Karloff vehicles, like The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang, Black Friday, and The Walking Dead and even Son of Frankenstein. Somewhere or other the detectives learn that the baron can jump to a different body if not destroyed by fire, so when they finally close in, both detectives have comically large flame-throwers. Once again, we know all the missing plot beats that got us there via other films. By skipping them, the filmmakers here avoid all cliche and familiarity, as if all those other films happened in this diegetic reality, just like the Italians!

Then there's the monster: his weird two fingered suction cup claw hands, his long forked tongue, his scattered tufts of hair, the weird hatchet-like planes of his face, the crudeness of his sculpted features, giant plastered-on fangs and pointy nose and ears. Clearly just a big latex (?) mask replete with open mouth and bulging eyes, somewhere between the Fly, the Devil Bat, and an anteater. His habits are a great blend of sophistication and outrageousness. When not eating them on the scene, the baron keeps his uneaten brains in a jar inside a locked desk in his expansive mansion, and takes periodic hits from it as needed. Though he does most of his pre-killing groundwork via hypnotic staring (a flashlight shining on and off in his face to indicate his occult/alien power), the baron always takes time to force the male descendant to watch--standing bug eyed and paralyzed--as he makes out with his wife or daughter before becoming the monster and sucking the brains of them both, then burning the place down. As they tried to have him burned... 300 years ago!

Blissfully expunging of all the more tiresome plot points and establishing shots of lesser films, The Brainiac is too fleet of foot to ever get dull even if his killing/kissing strategy is repeated with little variation from one descendant to the next. There are no exteriors or daytime stock footage 'next morning' inserts to dull the eerie dislocated nocturnal vibe - everything is on soundstage with rear projected stills for backdrops giving everything a sense of isolated nocturnal paralysis. There are no plucky girl reporters or comical bumpkins (the latter one of Mexican horror cinema's least crossover-able elements); no children, no animals in cages. Very few cast members at all - just a pair of detectives, the coroner, the baron, his butler, his parade of victims and their lovely wives or daughters, and the hero couple (the hero Ronny being a descendent of the baron's one friend who stood up for him).

It's the little details and hilarious English dubbing too that make it work. Cause and effect barely know each other in this alternated world of a stressed-out astronomer (he's so flummoxed by the comet's disappearance, he acts like a harried police chief) calves brain-eating, flame thrower-waving homicide detectives (with technical cop jargon at the scene of a double murder: "keep the parts separate, otherwise I might get mixed up!"), a coroner ("Just look at these two orifices!") and a weird direct lineage family tree situation; every one of his would-be executioners has exactly one descendent who looks just like them (except for one girl, leading to a one of the many wow but sublimely deadpan moments). All the members of his tribunal are even conveniently buried together in one old mausoleum. The old records of his trial are just lying around on people's desks like an old phone book. The baron knows the charges by heart: accused of "dogmatizing, using conjuring for evil ends that all men are attracted to, and seducing young maidens that couldn't... couldn't resist!"

Lastly, cementing its classic status is a kind of strange lonesome soundstage nocturne vibe, both chilling and comforting. There's the baron's first night in town, drifting into a closing, empty bar, with one guy sweeping up, another counting the till, the lonely girl at the bar drinking her isolation away who welcomes him without question. Towards the end, the baron has killed most of the cast, so when he tells the inquisitive cops to send his sympathy to their loved ones, the detective says, "it's impossible. There's no one left to feel sorry for now." The sets seem to breathe in deeply in relief or fear, as the backgrounds of scenes empty from the one or two extras that were loitering in the corners just scenes before. When the baron first meets Ronny and his fiancee outside the observatory he instantly bonds with them over astronomy. Later when the pair come to visit (it turns out his fiancee is his last intended victim), they remember their meeting, and the baron says "we became friend then, did we not?" The baron seems to want to be friends, and so do the victims. It's as if everyone was just waiting for something like the baron's grand Gothic reception hall (clearly left over from some bigger budgeted-production) to come colliding like some chimera from Universal horror's past into a modern day poverty row police procedural noir. All the characters immediately accept random invitations to the baron's mansion, as if just waiting for the cool new kid to kickstart their social lives. Yet they have no clear idea what to do there: all are introduced by the butler, grab a drink and mill around, then turn around and say good-night minutes later. At the wedding of one of the couples the baron is the only one in attendance (he shows up late, is why, and meets them at the church foyer.

In short, this Mexico, all wrapped up in its emptied interior loneliness, is is a very strange reality: there are only ever the characters we see. Nothing exists beyond the camera's proscenium arch, giving it all a beguiling interiority and feverish dream logic. Somewhere in there, the baron even falls in love with Ronny's fiancee, though there's no indication of when, why, or how. He must kill her though, since she's a descendant, the last one: "My hate is much stronger than my love, like a master no one can control!" He goes on and on: "Why did destiny elect you! ? Why? I want to know!" She faces away from him in classic soap opera Latin over-emotion as he says all these things; like she doesn't want her husband to know about how much reciprocal desire feels, like it's all just the usual Besos y Lagrimas-style suds. Suddenly the baron can also become invisible and run right through people; and then as soon as the baron is vaporized by flame, the film ends - without even a shot of the reunited lovers heading off into the sunrise. For what these characters don't seem to know is, without the baron's presence, none of them are destined to survive 'the End.'

And just like that, it's over. We kind of have to wake up. The rest of Station 11 and all those terrifying vertigo end of the world global warming too fast Covid leaky ceiling work woes are all still waiting to pounce and send us hyperventilating to the bathroom to splash cold water on the back of our necks But don't worry. There are miracles of our modern age as well as horrors. We may all be isolated in our cribs, the world coming us to digitized without even the warmth of a funeral pyre as comfort, but movies like The Brainiac aren't going anywhere. They're everywhere, in fact, even on our phones, like some kind of weird twilight rosary, or a passing comet, its tail ready to whisk us out of the pyre, or into one.