I love creaky old SF chillers from the fifties. Gothic horror was out and science fiction nightmares were in. Teenagers flocked to drive-ins to watch Invasion of the Saucer Men, The Crawling Eye, The Brain Eaters, and dozens of other movies with lurid titles.

Creature with the Atom Brain is slightly better than the rest of the hoard, mostly due to an above-average script by Curt Siodmak. Siodmak penned screenplays for genuine classics like The Wolf Man, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Beast with Five Fingers. However, classy horror had fallen way out of style, and Siodmak wrote the script for Bride of the Gorilla a few years before Creature with the Atom Brain.


This movie is a bit of a slog, with a lot of dialogue for the first half, and very little action. A diabolical scientist created a process in which he could reanimate fresh corpses with radiation. If that isn't nifty enough, he hot wires their brains and can remotely view everything his space age zombies see.

Executive Producer Sam Katzman (The Werewolf, The Giant Claw, Zombies of Mora Tau) was a notorious cheapskate, and he had to be thrilled with the Creature with the Atom Brain script. Virtually no special makeup was required. The zombies are just regular guys in suits and ties, with blank expressions on their faces. It looks like they used magic markers to put a line straight across their foreheads and dots on the top and bottom of it.

Richard Denning, the second fiddle scientist from Creature from the Black Lagoon, plays a jovial cop with a dimwit wife and daughter. Stereotypical fifties gender roles are fully enforced in the family.

An evil German scientist with the wonderfully sinister name Wilhelm Steigg is the man responsible for the atomic zombies. A decade after World War II and Germans are still the token bad guys. Cut to a decade after that. Me and my friends played war using toy guns and sticks, we most often were Nazi hunting. My own German heritage didn't sway me a bit. For that matter, Curt Siodmak was born in Dresden and got out before the city was devastated by firebombs.

Creature with the Atom Brain trods along until the last ten minutes. Things pick up as a group of atom brains fight the police. The monsters look more like a bunch of fifties businessmen after too many cocktails at lunch than anything frightening.

Despite the many flaws in Creature with the Atom Brain, I like it a lot. There's something oddly comforting about these old Z Grade movies. This and many others like it are a fun time, and you don't need an atomic upgrade brain to enjoy them.

Written by Mark Sieber

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