Director – Chano Urueta, Screenplay – Federico Curiel & Adolfo Lopez Portillo, Producer – Abel Salazar, Photography (b&w) – Jose Ortiz Ramos, Music – Gustavo Cesar Carrion, Special Effects – Juan Munoz Ravelo, Production Design – Javier Torres Torija. Production Company – Cinematografica ABSA, S.A..
Cast
Abel Salazar (Baron Vitelius Destera), Ruben Rojo (Reynaldo Miranda), Rosa Ma. Gallardo (Victoria Contreras), Luis Aragon (Professor Saturnio Millian), German Robles (Sebastian de Pantoja), David Silva (Commandante), Federico Curiel (Detective), Rene Cardona (Baltasar de Meneses), Roxana Bellini (Maria de Pantoja), Ofelia Guilmain (Senora Meneses), Ariadne Welter (Girl in Bar)
Plot
Mexico City in 1661. Baron Vitelius Destera is sentenced to burn by the Inquisition for crimes of witchcraft, magic and depravity. He dies promising that he will visit vengeance on the descendants of his accusers when the comet in the sky returns in three hundred years’ time. Three hundred years later in the present-day, Reynaldo Miranda is shown the comet in the sky by the astronomer Professor Saturnio Millian. A rock descends to Earth and the returned Baron Destera emerges from it. The Baron then sets about enacting his vengeance against the descendants of his accusers, transforming into a creature that sucks out the brains of his victims with its tongue.
The Mexican horror film is a largely unrecognised genre in most English language studies. It began in the 1950s with works such as The Vampire (1957) and sequel, which starred German Robles as the title character and this film’s lead Abel Salazar playing the Van Helsing equivalent, and The Aztec Mummy (1957) and sequels. There was also an incredibly popular fad for films featuring masked lucha libra wrestlers as superheroes, most notedly the Santo films and to a lesser extent those featuring other wrestlers like Blue Demon, Neutron and the Wrestling Women, who would be pitted against various monsters. Abel Salazar became a regular star and producer among these, also directing fourteen films although none of these were horror films.
The witch (or in this case warlock) returned from the dead to exact retribution on the descendants of those that burned them at the stake was a popular theme around this time in films such as City of the Dead (1959) and in particular Mario Bava’s influential Black Sunday (1960). The Brainiac conducts a riff on that but with the addition of the warlock transforming into a strange bat-like monster that sucks out the brains of victims with its forked tongue. This makes for a film that feels like a Frankenstein-ian patchwork of horror ideas that don’t quite gel together.
The Brainiac, Baron Vitelius Destera attacks a victim
The bat creature with its absurdly fake-looking head and long leathery tongue that pokes out has a bizarreness that has given The Brainiac a certain appeal among the psychotronic film cult. The only explanation I can think of for the addition of the bat monster to the mix is that The Fly (1958) had also been a recent success and this was trying to emulate that with the addition of another vaguely similar looking human-monster hybrid creature. You also cannot deny that director Chano Urueta has a certain style – there’s a nifty effect where a band of light moves across Abel Salazar’s eyes whenever he is about to transform.
For all that he is portrayed as a figure of great depraved evil, Baron Destera is fairly tame in terms of what he actually does. When he approaches victims, he seems to do no more than paralyse the man, move towards the woman with sinister intent while transforming into the creature. He does have a trick where he keeps the shrunken brains inside a ciborium and then eats a spoonful of brain just before he transforms. There are a couple of novelty deaths that come with some imagination – one where a victim has been hung upside from a shower head so that he can be drowned in the bathwater, another where the Baron persuades Rene Cardona to step inside an open furnace.
