Creature With the Atom Brain

Edward L. Cahn made many B-films in the horror genre. One of them was Creature With the Atom Brain, one of hundreds of films that were made during the atomic age that traded on the idea that radiation could cause a lot of funky things (in can, but has never made giant ants).

In this film, a gangster seeks to get even with those who had him jailed and deported by funding a scientist who has figured out how to reanimate dead corpses with radiation. They respond to commands and have super strength--the first scene is one of these creatures holding his victim aloft and snapping his spine (in silhouette, of course, this was 1955).

The police are baffled, especially when fingerprints show that the killer was dead for weeks. But bodies have been stolen from the morgue, and the blood left at the scene was highly radioactive, so soon a forensic scientist (Richard Denning) pieces it together.

As with Gun Fight, Creature With an Atom Brain is only entertaining when thought of as nostalgia. It's never scary, although the reanimated corpses are pretty gruesome (watch out for people who have a nasty surgical scar across their foreheads--it could mean they've had their skull caps removed and reattached). The film did take a sinister turn when Denning's partner (S. John Launer) is killed and used by the bad guys--he goes to Denning's house, looking for him, and instead encounters his young daughter. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, who threw a little girl into a lake, Launer only dismembers her doll.

Although I had never heard of this film before my Cahn retrospective, it has made inroads in popular culture. A Belgian punk band took the title as its name, and '60s rock legend Rory Erickson wrote a song using the title.