Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
One of the great horror movies of the 1960s is Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. In the opening sequence, a woman is accused of worshipping Satan, which she freely admits to doing. She suffers a terrible punishment (including having a spiked masked hammered onto her face), but before she dies, she swears she will return and revenge herself on the descendants of those who are sentencing her to death. I bring this up because this is pretty much the same plot as The Brainiac (or El Baron del Terror if you want the original Spanish).
In the opening sequence of The Brainiac, Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar) is accused of a host of crimes by the Mexican branch of the Inquisition. As he is about to be burned at the stake, he vows to return when the (extremely fake-looking) comet that is overhead returns, in 300 years. Since all of this takes place in 1661, you can guess that the Baron is coming back in 1961, essentially the film’s present day. And, because this is aping Black Sunday, the Baron has vowed to wipe out the lineages of all of his accusers.
So, now in the present, astronomers Rolando Miranda (Ruben Rojo) and Victoria Contreras (Ariadne Welter) are investigating the same fake-looking comet that has returned. And, of course, this means the Baron is going to return as well. He does in the form of a meteorite, and while he has the ability to appear as his old self, his actual appearance is a giant-skulled vampiric-looking creature with a gigantic forked tongue. Honestly, his head looks like it was made out of papier-mâché.
So, now in the modern world, the Baron starts killing off the descendants of those who had him killed. For ease, there’s only a single descendant of each person, so in 300 years, these folks appear to have had family trees that look like telephone poles. They are also all still living in the same area of Mexico, making things very convenient for the Baron.
Anyway, the Baron murders people by hypnotizing them, switching back into his real form, and then sucking out their brains through the backs of their necks. He somehow manages to keep the brains intact, because he keeps them and periodically eats a bite or two from them, which is genuinely the only remotely scary or disturbing thing in the film. While all of this is well and good, the conflict happens when the Baron discovers that he is in love with Victoria, who is naturally a descendant of one of his accusers. The problem is that Victoria is planning on marrying Rolando, who is the sole descendant of Marcos Miranda, the only person who attempted to defend the Baron in the 17th century.
I’m not going to pretend that The Brainiac is anything other than what it is—goofy fun with a ridiculous monster. The Baron, bluntly, is silly looking. His tongue refuses to fit in his giant head, and it looks like he has lobster claws for hands. Honestly, it would have been a lot scarier just to keep him looking like a normal person and have him extract the brains of his victims in a different way. It’s genuinely hard to take it seriously.
But, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? This is so clearly a film that wants to have the same sort of audience and the same sort of reaction as Bava’s Black Sunday, and there’s no way it could. Hell, even Black Sunday can’t live up to its opening sequence. This is clearly trying to play the same notes, and it simply doesn’t have the wit or the intelligence to do anything much more than copy it badly.
That all said, I didn’t hate this. It’s short, it’s silly, and it’s about as scary as a wet paint sign, but there’s a certain charm to just how amateurish it all looks. It was clearly made in earnest, and it’s this sort of obvious enthusiasm that isn’t matched by talent that has made it something of a cult hit. It’s hard not to like it, at least a little bit.
Why to watch The Brainiac: Because one bite of the Black Sunday apple is never enough.
Why not to watch: It’s dippy.
