The Brain That Wouldn't Die
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 70 m, 1962
Directed by Joseph Green. Stars Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniels, et al.

Some bad movies—The Beast of Yucca Flats or Manos: Hands of Fate come quickly to mind—are so trying that they make us want to do an Entwistle off the Hollywood sign, while other bad movies—Plan Nine from Outer Space is the one most schlock aficionados cite, though I favor Robot Monster—are so distinctively awful that they can hold us spellbound. (Do I really need to invoke that old train wreck analogy?) The Brain That Wouldn’t Die belongs to the latter category: It is so illogically scripted, so awkwardly cut, so mind-bendingly weird that you can’t pull yourself away from it. You watch this thing with your mouth agape, all the while unsure if you’re bearing witness to the work of a hopeless naïf or an unsung maestro of the avant-garde. (It’s been twenty years or better since I first saw Robot Monster, and I’m still not sure which way to look at Phil Tucker.) I doubt Brain’s writer and director, Joseph Green, was much for fancy book learnin’; the science on display here is about as wobbly as a Weeble on a Rock-O-Plane (though if you judge it against the medical mumbo jumbo that Universal’s scribes dashed off for Captive Wild Woman and House of Frankenstein, it starts to sound like Alexis fucking Carrel). Green may have been unskilled (it’s hard to say, really; he only made a couple of pictures), but Brain clearly demonstrates that he aimed to please, and that’s the thing that endears us to other Golden Turkey Award-winning directors like Ed Wood and William “One Shot” Beaudine. (The pathetic Jackie Kong couldn’t care less if her audience has a good time or not, so I have no reservations whatsoever about bringing her name into disrepute.) I can forgive a movie almost anything if it doesn’t bore me, so naturally I’m going to champion The Brain That Wouldn’t Die—it’s entertaining as all get-out. Yes, the dialogue is purple, the sets are ratty, and the acting is so-so, but I’ll be doggoned if Brain didn’t keep messing with my brain long after it ended.

Though film snobs erroneously dismiss it as exploitation, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die crosses over many genres, particularly horror, sci-fi, and noir. It’s an untidy heap, to be sure, but I’ll take it any day over the glossy, purposeless fare Hollywood routinely cranks out. Stephen Hajnal’s black and white photography isn’t artful—it’s economical and stark, like Night of the Living Dead. There’s also a minimum of fuss in Paul Fanning’s art design: The operating room in which the story begins is a chintzy, slapdash affair that evokes a set from a junior high school play (or an Ed Wood movie). A father and son surgical team—Dr. (insert whatever Christian name you like here) Cortner (Bruce Brighton) and Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers, aka Jason Evers), respectively—are fighting to save the life of an accident victim. Dad is strictly by the book and a moralist, prattling on about the Hippocratic Oath and such, while sunny boy is cut from the same cloth as Victor Frankenstein or Sigmund Walters—he wants to “play God.” (Though his theories on transplantation hardly sound radical by today’s standards.) When their patient catches the midnight train to Slab City, the eldest Cortner lowers his head ignominiously and calls the time of death. “You did everything you could,” a nurse assures him. “Everything?” he ponders. “Everything but save my patient.” Well, it’s a good thing that the slightly more ambitious Cortner is on duty: He slices open the dead man’s melon and electrically stimulates the gray matter inside, motivating his heart and bringing him back from the great unknown. Senior grudgingly congratulates junior on the rescue, but he lets it be known (criminently, this guy never stops pontificating) that he’s still not down with subjecting human beings (even the cold and stiff ones) to untried procedures.

Well, Papa Cortner doesn’t know the half of it. You see, Bill has a secret lab in the basement of his country home, and he’s been stealing amputated limbs from the hospital to use in his experiments there. One afternoon as he’s driving his voluptuous fiancée, Jan Compton (Virginia Leith), out to see the place, he takes a hairpin turn a little too fast and crashes his convertible. (The editor, Marc Anderson, had his work cut out for him, so to speak; the filmmakers didn’t have enough money to actually stage an accident.) Bill is thrown clear, but the love of his life is decapitated. So he rushes her severed head (he couldn’t save her body; it was all but consumed by fire) to his laboratory, where he and his maimed assistant, Kurt (Leslie Daniels), put it in a pan (hence the teasing moniker, Jan in the Pan) and connect it to all sorts of tubes and electrical doodads. By using his new and improved “adrenal serum,” Bill is able to keep the head perky as he hits the town to find it a new body. But while he’s haunting strip clubs and attending beauty contests, Jan’s nightmarish predicament is making her more and more cuckoo. (Still, she handles losing her body a lot better than I would.) And the solution that has reanimated her head has also inadvertently given her ESP: She’s not only able to tap into Bill’s sick thoughts as he goes about hunting for the ideal female specimen, but she can also communicate wordlessly with the mysterious creature that’s locked away in the laboratory closet. The creature (we don’t see anything but its arm until the end of the picture) is a walking patchwork of the doctor’s many failed experiments with transplantation, and it’s more than happy to help Jan get revenge on her mad scientist boyfriend.

As ridiculous as all this sounds, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is a surprisingly deft black comedy. There’s a great running gag in which every time Bill finds a girl whose figure complements his fiancée’s head, some nosey Parker happens by to thwart the killing. (The busty broads that Green puts on parade are like R. Crumb illustrations come to life.) I also had fun watching Kurt get all riled up and red-faced during his philosophical exchanges with Jan. (He’s arguing with a disembodied head, fer crissakes!) Absurdists will love Brain, but there’s plenty here to satisfy the gorehounds, too: When Kurt loses his one good arm (the other is withered and deformed from a transplant gone terribly wrong) to the monster in the closet, he stumbles around leaking vital fluid for what seems like several minutes before he finally goes down for the count. (It’s like watching one of Marlon Brando’s hammy death scenes from The Godfather.) Initially, I feared that getting a full view of the monster would prove disappointing; I had most of the film to form my own ghastly pictures. But George Fiala’s make-up, while hardly on the level of Jack Pierce, is nothing if not revolting. The mock-up of Jan’s head that’s used in many of the effect shots is well done, too.

October 11, 2009 

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.