THE BRAINIAC Movie Review

El Baron del Terror
Baron of Terror

Abel Salazar produced a series of horror films in Mexico in the late 1950s and 1960s, and while it would be fair to categorize most of them as truly terrible, some of them—such as Curse of the Doll People and The Brainiac—have a nightmarish quality that's not easy to dismiss. This one has a plot about a centuries-old sorcerer who continues to survive by devouring the brains of the descendants of his executioners. Sometimes he uses a long, forked tongue to ingest his cranial nourishment, and sometimes he simply eats them out of a dish with a spoon—at least as I remember it. I get the feeling that these pictures (dubbed) were heavily edited for American release, making the silly stories even more incoherent. Yet a nightmare with imagery this … well, disgusting, can sometimes be even more effective when the plot makes no sense at all. The Brainiac (El Baron del Terror) is outrageous enough to be my personal favorite of the series, but do take my rating as a warning to those who think that foreign cinema should be—pardon the expression—more cerebral.

NEXT STOP … The Conqueror Worm, Black Sunday, Suspiria

1961 75m/B MX Abel Salazar, Ariadne Welter, Mauricio Garces, Rosa Maria Gallardo, Ruben Rojo, German Robles; D: Chano Urueto; W: Frederick Curiel, Alfredo Torres Portillo; C: Jose Ortiz Ramos; M: Gustavo Cesar Carrion. VHS SNC, MRV, HHT