31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Movie 2

When a warlock is burned at the stake by the Inquisition, he vows to return along with a comet in order to destroy the descendants of those who punished him. He returns in 1961 in some sort of space rock as a shape shifting monster who sucks the brains of his victims out of the back of their heads using his long forked tongue.

Unfortunately, my copy of El baron del terror (1962) is the dubbed into English version known as Brainiac. You can tell things are going to be bad right away when the head of the Inquisition's American voice sounds more at home selling luxury cars than torture, and it only gets worse from there. I don't know how much better the original dialogue is in Spanish, or if the performances are more nuanced, but even if they are, the quality of this movie can only go up so much. I don't care if the monster's mask is really poorly made, it's still pretty uncanny looking and the actor wearing it can get it to look like it's throbbing, so it gets a pass in my book. The big problem is that this movie essentially has two types of scenes, ones in which nothing is really happening, and scenes in which the Baron is hypnotizing, then killing his victims which are incredibly repetitive. Even a truncated 8 minute long Super 8 version of this movie would probably have room for some editing without the viewer being at a loss as to what the movie is about.