Creature with the Atom Brain

Plot synopsis:
The movie opens at night with a lone figure of a man walking towards the camera along a tree-lined pathway. We hear a heartbeat and crickets, then title and credits roll. A car is seen driving down an empty highway at night. The car stops near a lamp post and the driver exits the vehicle. A long surgical scar is visible on his forehead. He walks towards a stone clad building that is being secured for the night. Inside the casino, a cashier hands his boss a case with $20,000. Jim Hennessey (uncredited) puts the cash into the wall safe. In a lab, the man approaching the casino is being monitored. We will learn later the man with the scar is Willard Pearce (an uncredited Karl 'Killer' Davis) and he has been dead for nearly a month. Pearce breaks a window and enters the office. He tells Hennessey, "I told you I'd come back." Hennessey pulls a gun and pumps three bullets into the intruder with no effect. The intruder picks Hennessey up and we see, in shadow, his back is broken. Pearce pockets the cash from the safe and walks away. Two casino employees enter the office and fire at the intruder. At the lab, a man, Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) directs the intruder to return home. Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gay) takes the microphone and directs Pearce into the car. Steigg assures his colleague that the creature will return home. Steigg and Buchanan discuss their business and research agreement. They don radiation suits and crawl through a tunnel into the main lab. Two additional men with surgical scars on their heads sit hooked up to IV lines.At the casino, the police arrive in force to investigate the burglary and murder. Dr. Chet Walker (Richard Denning) and Capt. Dave Harris (S. John Launer) talk to District Attorney MacGraw (Tristram Coffin) about the case. Chet notices that the fingerprints the killer left on the windowsill are luminous, and Dave notices the footprints and blood have the same curious property. Chet starts his examination of the evidence. He concludes that the blood is radioactive.Dave drives over to the Walker residence. He is greeted at the door by Chet's wife, Joyce (Angela Stevens). The Walker daughter, Penny (Linda Bennett) comes from the kitchen to greet her "Uncle Dave". Joyce goes upstairs to wake her husband and announce Dave's arrival. Over the breakfast table Dave reveals there was a match on the fingerprints. What is more unusual is they match a dead man's prints. Dave gets a call at Chet's home. The two men depart to listen to a wax cylinder recording made during the casino heist.At his home, District Attorney MacGraw is confronted by a creature, Vernon Dunn (an uncredited Michael Ross) in his garage. The assailant pulls the steering wheel off his car then kills him. Chet and Dave review the recording. As they are ready to leave they are informed that MacGraw was found dead. They go to the scene of the crime. The coroner explains the cause of death, but is at a loss to explain how a human grip could cause such injuries. Chet retrieves a Geiger counter from the trunk of his car and examines MacGraw's car. Chet tells Dave, "Call the inspector and tell him I want to talk to him as soon as possible. And ask him to have the Mayor and the commanding General of this military area. We're going to need all the cooperation we can get on this one."A television broadcast is witnessed by Steigg and Buchanan. From information presented on television they conclude Chet Walker knows too much about their scheme and must be eliminated. Chet and Dave arrive at the office of Chief of Police Camden (Charles Evans). They are introduced to Mayor Bremer (Pierre Watkin) and General Saunders (an uncredited Lane Chandler). Chet briefs the assembled. He uses the Faraday experiment using electricity on a frog's leg as a way to explain how dead tissue can be animated using radioactivity. Chet asks the general to help track down the source of radioactivity.After a visit to the local military base, Chet returns home. Joyce is shocked to read the headlines in the local newspaper, "Do Dead Men Walk City Streets?" Chet assures Joyce that there is a pattern to the deaths and their daughter is in no danger playing outside. Dave stops at the Walker residence. He tells Chet there is a connection between Hennessey and MacGraw -- they secured the conviction of Buchanan some ten years earlier. Hennessey turned on his boss to become the top mobster and Buchanan vowed revenge.At police headquarters Dave had three men brought in for their own protection. Lester Banning (an uncredited Don C. Harvey) was the assistant D.A. on the Buchanan case. He is a lawyer now is private practice. Jason Franchot (an uncredited Edward Coch) was Buchanan's accountant. The last of the three is Tom Dunn (an uncredited Paul Hoffman) whom Dave describes as Buchanan's gunsel. Of course, Dunn strongly objects to the term, so Dave rephrases as, "paid killer, like it better?" The three men refuse to be locked up for their own protection, but reluctantly agree to a protective detail. A short time later a creature dressed as a policeman comes to relieve the officer protecting Franchot. He kills Franchot, then the officer he relieved.The military starts their vehicle and aircraft search of the city for the source of the radioactivity. Dr. Steigg stops at a drug store in town then orders a glass of beer at a nearby bar. He is startled by a search vehicle outside the bar. He hastily pays for his drink and departs leaving a $10 bill. The bartender (an uncredited Eddie Foster) tries to give him change but Steigg is gone. A sergeant carrying a Geiger counter enters the bar and gets his strongest reading on the glass of beer. The bartender explains that the drink belongs to a man who ran out. He reluctantly offers up the ten dollar bill and is told that the currency is very radioactive.Chet stops by the office of Kenneth C. Norton, M.D. (an uncredited Nelson Leigh) at City Hospital. Norton briefs Chet on Steigg's biography and work. Norton shows Chet a film on brain implant research. Buchanan chastises Steigg for leaving the lab and possibly compromising their location, but Steigg explains he needed pain medication for his hand. Buchanan directs one of the creatures (an uncredited Dick Crockett) to contact Chief Camden and tell him to stop all search activities or else. The authorities refuse and a wave of destruction is launched.Franchot has been turned into a creature. He is masquerading as a military officer dispatched to kill Chet, but he kills Dave and returns him to the laboratory for surgery. Dave, now dead and surgically altered, pays a visit to the Walker residence. Chet already left for the office, but Dave sits with Penny in the living room. Dave leaves after Joyce tells him what Chet told her about the two men still under protective custody. Dave arrives at the county jail and is told by a policeman (an uncredited Tyler McVey) that Chet was trying to locate him. Dave kills Banning and Dunn while claiming to be Buchanan, then drives away with Chet in the front seat of the car. He is directed to crash the car, but Chet jumps out before the car overturns. Dave's body is brought to the hospital to be examined by Dr. Norton. Dave escapes the hospital, steals a police car, and drives back to the lab and his radioactive source of power. Chet follows in a helicopter.Steigg panics at the police and military presence so Buchanan dispatches him with a wrench. He directs his army of zombies to confront the authorities out on the lawn. Dave steps out of the stolen police car and tries to enter the lab through a window for the radium source. Chet enters first and confronts Buchanan. A fight ensues and Dave enters the lab and kills Buchanan. Chet destroys the lab which deactivates the creatures.We close at a birthday celebration for Penny. Penny blows out the candles on her cake and the camera zooms in on a newspaper headline, "Creatures with Atom Brains Detroyed."

Tags: revenge

Review:
A high minded German scientist [in the 1950's??] is duped by a vengeful, deported gangster into creating atomic-powered zombies from the recently deceased, stolen from the local morgue, in order to wreak revenge upon his enemies.[Whew!] Now that is a dynamite combination!
I must admit that I remember many scenes from this minor little picture more vividly than much better films I saw as a kid: atomized Karl "Killer" Davis busting into a room to break the back of a gangster, the scene where Richard Denning discovers his partner has become a zombie, and the films climax where an army of creatures with atom brains do battle with the police.
Seen today by younger audiences influenced by MST3K or cheaply cynical critics like John Stanley and Randy Dreyfus, CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN probably looks pretty bad.
However, if one views this film in the right frame of mind, it is very entertaining.Apparently CREATURE WITH ATOM BRAIN has effected a lot of people over the years.
Having just seen this for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised; this is a solid, well-acted and scripted, somewhat tongue-and-cheek but scary horror/sci-fi film with a premise simutaneously nightmarishly banal/outrageous: a petty American criminal (looking like a cheap burley thug, the kind who would "threaten" George Reeves on the cheap sets on the t.v. Superman) hooks up in Europe with a German (read: Nazi) scientist experimenting with neural stimulation, and uses the doctor to seek revenge on his enemies by having the doctor's lab subjects become zombiefied killing machines, all via t.v. screens and microphones.
(the genius of the movie, I think!) I highly recommend this to all sci-fi/horror film buffs..
Fans of late night 1950's science fiction (insert Cleveland's "Goulardi" show here) remember this not as "Creature with the Atom Brain" but as the movie with Uncle Dave.
The premise, to quote Penny's father (Richard Denning): "Remote-controlled creatures, their brains powered by atomic energy, roaming the streets, directed from a central point".
The background involves the deportation of Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger), an American gangster who vows revenge and finances a not so mad German scientist (Gregory Gaye) who is developing a process (based on then trendy radioactivity) to animate dead bodies.
Although the authorities have discovered that the bodies are controlled by electrodes surgically planted in their brains, they conveniently fail to mention this to the police and national guardsmen who are fighting the monsters; allowing the climatic scene to continue until other means are found to deactivate the creatures.
I had to walk (run) by some woods in the dark on the way home from this movie and I was quite convinced that one of these guys was going to stroll out from among the trees and break me in half just as the first creature, Karl 'Killer" Davis, did to his gangster victim in the opening scene.
One might think with the extremely low budget, the lack of true star power, and a title like Creature with the Atom Brain that this project would be nothing more than many of the same types of science fiction/horror films grinded out in the 1950s, but it is better than you might expect.
Like other movies of its era and genre, the film is fast-paced and to the point without a lot of expository information given to the audience.
Both the story and script are the work of Curt Siodmak, the famed horror/science fiction writer of such films as The Wolfman, I Walked with a Zombie, and so many others.
Angela Stevens as Denning's wife has little to do, but she looks very nicely doing it nonetheless.Michael Granger and Gregory Gaye play Buchanan and the scientist respectively and are also adequate.
While not a great film, Creature with the Atom Brain is a solid 50's sci-fi addition and quite possibly even a forerunner to movies like The Night of the Living Dead..
when they made this?) employing a crazed/mad scientist (I guess there were a lot of them left over from the Los Alamos days) to make nasty looking dead old men crawl through tunnels made of industrial plastic wrap and go kill people.
Richard Denning,the star of this film, made a number science fiction movies in the 1950's before coming over to TV as the governor of Hawaii in "Hawaii 5-0." As far as I know, this movie is not available on the market as a retail product.
The police have a crazy idea that dead men are being reanimated using atomic power--making them robotic zombies!!
Not much going on here (but it might amuse those who have never seen a lot of B films), with standard Columbia production values (looks like an episode of "Beverly Hillbillies", in other words) and merely adequate direction by pro Cahn -- the real value of this kind of B-movie has to come from the script, and in this case it's fairly standard, although there is some fun dialogue.
Gangster Frank Buchanan getting involved with ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Wihelm Steigg has him create a number of zombies from corpses, that he stole from the local city morgue, to go out and kill those who had him sent away.By rejuvenating their dead brains cells with high doses of atomic energy Dr. Steigg is able to make the dead rise again as their sent out to kill those whom Buchanan commands them too.
With police Captain Dave Harris kidnapped killed and mind controlled by Buchanan and Dr. Steigg he's then sent back to his police station to finish off both gangsters Dunn & Banning, who are there in protective custody, in order to get his revenge on the whole lot: Hennessey MacGraw Dunn & Banning.By now Dr. Steigg is scared stiff that Buchanan's mad actions will lead the police to his hideout and wants to call it quits.
Winning the first round against the US Army the zombies also start causing havoc all over the state with them, by using their atomic brains, having planes fall from the skies trains derail and cars and trucks lose control on the highways and slam into each other.Just when it looked like curtains for the US Army and local police with the zombies, and Buchanan, about to take over its then when the mind numbed and brain dead Capt.
Harris nukes Buchanan, with a blast of atomic energy, and destroyed the machinery that controls the rampaging zombies causing them to drop harmlessly like flies.Captain Harris is the big hero in this film even though he never knows it with his brain in limbo only being, for a time, able to take orders from Buchanan.
But at least he made his brief yet explosive stay on earth, as a living dead man, a rewarding one in putting an end to the evil Buchanan/Steigg atomic zombie menace..
Mostly as a filler for the time after the local news and the start of prime time.as a kid and as an adult i have always look forward to the old movies and this is one good flick for its time.I am trying to find this on DVD and would appreciate if some one who reads will help me find it although it will probably pretty tough.When Tris movie was on the TV i would always make an effort to see it.Although seemly laughable i still think it is a worthwhile investment for what is still a good scare.When the zombies come out to do battle with the police is still a shocker even by todays standards.
It hits the ground running and runs just over 69 minutes.The story has a vengeance crazed mobster named Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) hooking up with a mad German scientist, Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gaye) who is able to reanimate dead bodies using atomic energy.
Granger sends these zombies after his enemies while police lab doctor Chet Walker (Richard Denning) and the cops try to solve the gruesome crimes.Zombies and gangsters prove to be a diverting mix, and director Edward L.
Edward Cahn's "Creature with the Atom Brain" was one of the neatest results, focusing on an exiled gangster who hires a German scientist to figure out how to implant chips in people's brains and make them go kill his enemies.Yes, at this point people still had a lot to learn about atomic energy and radiation (check out the suits that the gangster and scientist wear), but the point is to luxuriate in the sheer silliness of the movie's concept.
This movie was the most frightening film I saw as a child; I was 9 when it came out and was scared for a full year afterwards!
The only reason I went to see it is because it was the second feature after "It Came From Beneath the Sea." I had always loved Ray Harryhausen-type monster movies, but I had a dread of seeing "Creature With the Atom Brain" right from the start.
Romero to thank for phase IV, as he made zombies to what they still are to this date with "Night of the Living Dead": vile and merciless undead monsters that hunt down the living in order to feast on their flesh and brains.So, I'm probably exaggerating a bit, but I personally think that "Creature with the Atom Brain" is a historically relevant little B-movie.
Through zombies that are brought back to life with atomic energy and remote-controlled through brain wave manipulation, he kills off prosecutors but also fellow gangsters that betrayed him, while he remains within the safe and heavily isolated walls of his mansion.
The screenplay of "Creature with the Atom Brain" is very talkative and many of the dialogs are quite tacky, but the underlying ideas of the film are compelling and – as stated above – quite renewing.
The people who titled this movie got it wrong - there is more than one creature with an atom brain here!
This one has it all to make a great poster: "creatures" (not just one) who are technologically created zombies; a Nazi scientist; gangsters; revenge; some amazing confusion about the relationship between atomic "rays" (here the word is the incorrect "atom ray") and electronics, and finally a threatened little girl (who isn't really).Along the way we get rather direct references -- for the times -- to sex between our hero and his wife.
In CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN, mob-type Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) eliminates his enemies through mad science, sending out an army of remote-control zombies to do the dirty work.
At the police lab, Dr. Chet Walker (Richard Denning- CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, TARGET EARTH) is busy trying to discover the secret behind these homicidal automatons.
A gangster uses a German atomic scientist to turn cadavers into man-killing zombies in order to wreak revenge on those who deported him.Actually, the 60-minutes is better than the title suggests, not much, but some.
Sure, it's a cheesy plot, dispatching atom-brained zombies to carry out revenge killings.
Mind Control the Hard (wired) Way. This just Misses being an Unadulterated Classic like say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), it is nonetheless, at times, a Great Looking, Sleekly Designed, Bizarro Story that Anticipated things it never Anticipated.Like the Enduring and Endless Trend of Zombie Movies.
It concerns an ex-gangster teaming up with an eminent German scientist who has fallen into disrepute of late; together, they contrive to re-animate a series of dead bodies (apparently, their second life-expectancy is very short!) in order to eliminate the people involved in convicting the mobster  unsurprisingly, some of the victims end up themselves as zombies!!
THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958).CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN is actually the first Sam Katzman-produced horror film I've checked out  and it's one of four that were recently packaged together in Columbia's ongoing "Icons Of Horror" series of genre Box Sets; a second, THE GIANT CLAW (1957), followed this straight awayand, even if I wasn't exactly enthused with either of them, I'd still like to catch up with the remaining two titles (namely THE WEREWOLF [1956] and ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU [1957]).
Cahn directed this wacky Science Fiction thriller that stars Richard Denning as police doctor Chet Walker, hot on the trail of a gangster who is using an ex-Nazi scientist in his reanimating experiments to resurrect his dead thugs in order to take over the city.
Following a series of strange deaths across the country, a freak occurrence in the investigation leads police to a mad scientist working with a disgruntled gangster controlling reanimated dead people under their power to kill those who arrested him and must stop his deadly plot.This ended up being quite a bland and overall disappointing zombie effort.
Despite the appeal of doing so during the heyday of the 50s sci-fi monster movies running during the same time, in a horror film that type of story doesn't work for it lowers the on-screen amount of time the actual creatures take up, and that in itself is quite the opposite of what's supposed to happen in a genre-related film.
Granger while in Europe hooks up with a former Nazi doctor Gregory Gaye who has been experimenting with dead animals by injecting the brains with radioactive electric impulses.Having a whole army of zombie hit men sounds like one fabulous idea for any would be Mafia don.
"Creature with the Atom Brain" is a decent little film.
Cahn, with a clever and compelling script by Curt Siodmak, a brisk pace, sharp, moody black and white cinematography by Fred Jackman, Jr., genuinely creepy zombies, a spooky, rousing score by Mischa Bakaleinikoff, a tight 69 minute running time, and a thrilling conclusion, this nifty little quickie provides an inspired and entertaining blend of snappy straightforward horror and gritty film noirish crime thriller.
So, the films are very different storywise and feel very different, but have some really key similarities that make it fun watching and comparing them.In the end, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator is the better film, but Creature With the Atom Brain is still a lot of fun, even if slower paced (which is not to say slower paced is a bad thing at all, but just to give a heads up to those who might consider watching this), and the final moments with what the girl names her dolly and how she feels about it just makes me smile for no real reason associated directly with anything else that goes on in the film.I could totally see these two films as an awesome double bill, maybe at a drive in theater.
The actor who plays the gangster Buchanan and the hapless Captain who gets zombified are also quite good at what they do and in the way they play their characters.I'm still not sure why a gangster who had control of a small army of atomic powered zombies would waste his energy and time on revenge when he could have his minions rob any bank in the city and use terrorist tactics to make millions, but we'll skip right over that, and over the part where the heroes neglect to inform the army detachment that backs them up that the zombies are essentially immune to anything but head shots...and over the facts that both the gangster and the professor who aids him should be long dead of radiation poisoning before the final events of the movie (the professor steps out for a beer, and it is discovered that everything he has touched is hotter than a pistol.) Good move, great fun.
This is a solid, and over the top film, with a super villain's atomic zombie monster army plot.
For True Fans, CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN is in many ways EVOLUTIONARY: it marks a significant leap Forward for Zombie movies.
In 1955's "Creature With the Atom Brain" (released in July of that year as part of a truly awesome double feature, paired with "It Came From Beneath the Sea"), the handsome, blonde, sci-fi stalwart was faced with one of his most bizarre menaces yet: remote-controlled cadavers, animated by atomic energies, that are being used by an ex-crime boss to eliminate his old enemies; a menace that almost makes dinosaurs and giant bugs seem pedestrian!In the film, Denning plays Dr. Chet Walker, the head of the police lab in a large metropolitan city.
John Launer), having been turned into one of the atomic creatures by Buchanan and Steigg, arrives at Chet's house and talks with his unsuspecting wife (yummy Angela Stevens) and young daughter.
Cahn (who, over the next four years, would go on to helm such sci-fi and horror favorites as "The She-Creature," "Zombies of Mora Tau," "Voodoo Woman," "Invasion of the Saucer Men," "It!
The Terror From Beyond Space," "Curse of the Faceless Man" AND "Invisible Invaders," that last boasting a plot similar to "Creature"'s, with aliens taking over the bodies of the dead), a no-nonsense script from Curt Siodmak, and noirish cinematography by DOP Fred Jackman, Jr. Sadly, the film falters a bit in its final minutes, and for the life of me, after two recent viewings, I cannot figure out how the zombified Harris turns on Buchanan at the end, or what happens to Buchanan during the final melee.
The mobster named Buchanan likes to use a microphone to "speak through" the dead gangster zombie killers to those he is about to have killed as to remind them of who is responsible prior to their deaths!
Dead gangsters (and later cops) with "robotic" brains that can be controlled from a source, atomic energy used to give them great power that also includes being impervious to bullets or harm unless the machines and men behind them are put to rest; this all is preposterous yet entertaining nonsense.
Made at the height of the atom film craze, this lacks serious suspense and continues to rely on annoying clichés that go back 20 years.Hideously bad acting by the bad guys giving orders to the walking dead, this adds more idiotic clichés by giving leading man Richard Denning a typically boring domestic situation.