Review – The Brain Eaters

This movie has a lot of odd, unintentional touches. For example, Local Hero fans may get a small snicker from the credit for screenwriter Gordon Urquhart. The governor’s name is Clinton. Otherwise, however, this is just another piece of 1950s body-snatching paranoia. A large metal cone appears in a small Illinois town right around the same time several of the local residents go nuts. The connection turns out to be small critters – kinda cute when they aren’t attaching themselves to people’s spines – who’ve bored up from the depths of the earth to sneak into our brains and take over. And yes, the whole thing tastes a lot like leftovers. The score in particular is arbitrary stuff gleaned from other sources; I even noticed a few bars from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata at one point. One has to pay attention to catch small touches like that, but overall the picture doesn’t reward the attention required. See if desperate