Extolled by many schlock-film fans as a guilty pleasure, this stodgy saga of a manipulative space brain is indeed wildly entertaining -- on levels perhaps never intended by its makers. It is perhaps the quintessential John Agar performance, suited as it is to his special brand of deliberate, yet oddly convincing acting. To the surprise of no aficionado, Agar portrays a dedicated scientist recently baffled by a confounding series of signals emanating from a barren, mountainous area near his desert home. Against the better judgment of his lovely fiancé, Joyce Meadows, Agar treks toward the source of the readings accompanied by his enthusiastically curious assistant, Robert (Emergency!) Fuller. Upon spelunking said caves (actually the familiar confines of Hollywood's oft-filmed Bronson Canyon) the mystery of the emanations is revealed in the form of an immense floating brain with eyes. It describes its malicious intentions in an echo-laden voice before dispatching Fuller telepathically. The brain, named Gor, then slips into Agar's cranium, replacing the good doctor's personality with its own. Under Gor's control, Agar heads home where his dog barks at him suspiciously. His future father-in-law (the ever-dependable movie authority figure Robert Browne Henry) notes his irritability and his fiancé is flustered by his sudden sexual aggressiveness. Oh, that Gor. Before long, Gor/Agar is casually announcing his plans for world conquest at a meeting of top brass from the nearby air base. Gazing skyward through basilisk pupils, Agar causes a plane to explode, laughing maniacally all the while. If two heads are indeed better than one, you'd think a second brain would make for a more engrossing film. In this case, the arrival of a second Arousian brain, named Vol, makes the film twice as silly. Vol is a cop, hot on Gor's trail. He's shadowed the renegade brain all the way from the mean streets of Arous. Gor's goin' down. Curiously, both Gor and Vol are voiced by the same actor, Dale Tate, who makes a cameo appearance early in the film as himself(?!). The plan calls for Vol to inhabit the skull of Agar's dog, emerging at the critical moment when Gor must temporarily leave Agar's body to recharge his battery. As the cop brain explains, once floating freely, Gor is vulnerable at a specific spot on his bloated lobes. A single blow to this region will do him in. Sure enough, he's whacked with an ax in the film's final frames, allowing Agar a fading romantic clinch with Meadows, grinning at her overactive imagination. Women. Directed in evident haste by speed-conscious journeyman Nathan Juran, aka Nathan Hertz, The Brain From Planet Arous is not without its charms. The rocky desert setting echoes several, more notably atmospheric films of the period, particularly, It Came From Outer Space and The Monolith Monsters. And someone went to great lengths to make these brains seem scary. Though they're undoubtedly laugh-inspiring today, there's something gutsy about attempting to scare an audience with big, vein-laced balloons with crazed cartoony eyes. The idea is spooky. The execution is not. The notion of alien cops pursuing a deadly truant across the universe was novel and intriguing. Depicting these protagonists as wobbly outsized brains undermines the idea. As previously noted, if you're only going to see one John Agar film, make it this one. His full-tilt portrayal runs a B film gamut from laid-back, pipe-smoking prof to grinning deviant. Respect should be paid to this guy. A decorated war hero who survived a marriage to Shirley Temple, Agar descended rapidly from John Ford classics (She Wore A Yellow Ribbon) to paper-thin films like The Mole People in a matter of a few years. Yet even in indefensible dogs like Zontar, The Thing from Venus, his performances were quite serviceable and far better than the films deserved. In Arous, Agar throws himself unstintingly into the role, noting in later years that the black lenses he was required to wear while inhabited by the evil Gor were decidedly uncomfortable and may in fact have caused genuine damage to his vision. Director Juran's resume undoubtedly inspires a second glance. There's hardly a B movie sub-genre that hasn't felt the influence of his workmanlike hand. His collaborations with animator Ray Harryhausen (20,000,000 Miles to Earth, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) are in many ways outstanding, but it is for impoverished fare like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman that he'll long be remembered. In Brain From Planet Arous, he's hampered by ludicrous prop work and a small cast saddled with a first-draft script. Even so, Juran is able to wring a modicum of atmosphere from these meager ingredients. Whatever big screen moniker he went by, workhorse director Nathan Juran/Hertz could always be counted on to deliver the B movie goods. The precipitous teaming of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis in Juran's Hellcats of the Navy is of limited interest these days, but a grounding in his shock film output is by all means necessary: 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) Juran wrangled the human cast in what is perhaps Ray Harryhausen's most satisfying film. The animation is rarely short of impressive and the uniqueness of the Roman setting lends greatly to the film's climax. The oddly endearing personality of Harryhausen's animated creature however, clearly dominates the film. Acting: B Atmosphere: B Fun: A- The Deadly Mantis (1957) Much screen time is used in trying to convince the audience that the praying mantis is one of nature's most vicious and blood-thirstily crafty predators, all the better to scare us when a massive mantis emerges from the arctic ice. The dopey cardboard bug of the film's title sadly possesses little fright value. Acting: B- Atmosphere: C- Fun: C+ The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) Thought by many to be Harryhausen's finest hour, the stunning animation is enhanced for a change by a well-conceived script. Solid performances from Kerwin Matthews as Sinbad and Torin Thatcher as his evil counterpart nonetheless pale beside Harryhausen's stop-action bravado. Acting: B Atmosphere: B+ Fun: A- Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1959) Transformed by a gigantic, see-through alien into the titular titan, super-stacked Allison Hayes traipses through town wrapped in a massive bed sheet searching for her philandering husband. Her wobbling, papier-mache hand plucks him from the neighborhood honky-tonk as local tart Yvette Vickers looks on. Acting: C+ Atmosphere: D Fun: A