Whooooo! What a stinker. In 1959, Joseph Green, who made nothing else you’ve ever heard of, filmed The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. The picture wasn’t released until three years later, supposedly due to censorship difficulties, but I’d guess that was a mere alibi in a veiled attempt at those who cared for humanity’s well being to withhold releasing this cinematic monstrosity into society.
Doctor Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is a young doctor whose medical theories are less than mainstream concerning the topic of limb transplantation. After watching his son revive a patient who died on the operating table, Doctor Cortner (Bruce Brighton, who was never given a first name, even in the credits) leaves for a medical convention in Denver as he warns young Cortner, standing alongside his bride to be, Jan Compton (Virginia Leith), that he best be mindful of his moral responsibilities to the field. As Bill and Jan ride to a secluded cabin where Bill conducts his experiments, he loses control of his car and, during the crash, decapitates Jan. Quick on his medical toes, he leaves the body to burn but rushes her noggin to his lab. This is where we meet Bill’s assistant, Kurt (Leslie Daniels), a plastic surgeon who was in an “accident” which required his left arm to be amputated (perhaps he was riding with Bill). In hopes of regaining his precious limb in order to return to science, Kurt called upon Bill’s expertise which had yet to be honed. As a consequence, Kurt walks around with a shriveled nub for a hand. We watch as Bill suspends Jan’s head in a pan of fluids (à la Re-Animator) as a knock comes upon a nearby door. As Bill is out racing the clock (he has forty-eight hours to get his fiancée another body in which to transplant her head), Jan talks to the thing behind the door (trust me, the film’s as ambiguous as the previous statement), whom she coaxes into killing Kurt. Bill arrives back at the lab with Doris Powell (Adele Lamont) on the promise that he and his father will repair Doris’s scarred left cheek, the result of one abusive boyfriend too many. After drugging Doris and prepping for surgery, the thing behind the door escapes, revealing itself to be the “sum of all miscalculations” of Bill’s experimentation as it kills the malevolent doctor, carries off Doris, and leaves Jan to die in the burning laboratory.
Let me begin by saying that I restarted the disc on three occasions thinking that there was something wrong with my various DVD players before consenting to the fact that the soundtrack was miscued with the video. Reading through various reviews, I now know my DVD players are in fine shape. Yet, if eighty-eight minutes of lip dysplasia weren’t enough, I begun to squirm each time a character entered into a room because the ensuing echo was close behind. Apparently the “Sound Department,” comprised of not one, but two individuals (Emil Kolisch and Robert Lessner), were interns from the School of the Deaf.
Where to go from here . . . . Let’s start with the oversights in the film. The big doozy– and as you’re about to see, it had stiff competition–was the end title reading “The Head that Wouldn’t Die.” However, my personal favorite is when Bill, after being offered to judge a beauty pageant thematically titled the “Miss Body Beautiful Contest,” which is coincidentally a big time saver for him considering he’s on the clock as he scurries for the perfect body in which to fornicate with after he transplants his fiancée’s head onto it, the MC (Bruce Kerr) comes onstage and announces, “We have eliminated everyone except the five finalists.” Really! But wait, there’s more. He then introduces only four, count ’em, four women! (Apparently they eliminated one more for good measure.) Of course, confusion can be expected because everyone was a little woozy after the impact of Bill’s automotive collision–which occurred at such a rate of speed that his car took the initiative of breaking before Bill put his foot on the break pedal. But I digress. At the time of impact, Bill was hurdled at such a velocity that it not only threw him down a hill, but around the circumference of the earth, because he gets up and runs downhill in order to save Jan. Shortly thereafter, as he begins his hunt for the perfect body, Bill shimmies his way into the dressing room at a local strip club as he coerces the “Blonde Stripper,” played by Bonnie Sharie (hey, I’m just going with what the credits have given me), into his clutches just as, yep–you guessed it, the “Brunet (sic) Stripper” (Paula Maurice), enters and begins fighting for the attention of the good doctor. The blonde takes off her glove and reaches up to slap her nemesis. Various set pieces, such as the coat rack and the pictures hanging on the walls, were apparently adverse to the threat of violence and decided to quietly leave before physical contact was made. Amazingly, the femme fatale of the Kitty Kat Klub’s hand instantaneously becomes more masculine and a lot hairier (perhaps the same male hand which reaches up for Bill in the amid the car’s flames) before we cut back to find the glove back on her hand. (Gloves are a problem throughout the duration of the movie because Bill can’t seem to be able to decide if they are on or off his hands between cuts.) Not only this, but the blonde slaps the brunet so hard that the two opposing walls shift between frames! The insults don’t end here because once the blonde calls the brunet a “third grade stripper” (I suppose you could take that a handful of ways), the latter retorts, “I’ll mash you on the butt!” We wisely depart on that note along with Bill as the brunet’s globes are knocked around in the ensuing debacle. Once Bill gets word that the woman with the most beautiful body ever isn’t even present at the beauty pageant and that she only privately models at home, after the dust settles where Bill had been sitting, we arrive at Doris’s apartment where the CEO’s of The World’s Most Desperate Men are convening as they do their best to play the role of photographer. After everyone is hastily dismissed by Doris, she finds Bill petulantly standing on the far side of the room. Doris turns to reveal a horrendous scar along her left cheek, that is, the same side which was facing the cameras. She quickly announces that she’s a lesbian. We watch as Bill’s eyes light up at the prospect of having a lesbian body attached to a heterosexual head (perhaps he deduces that the combo will land him a bisexual wife). Once Bill arrives back at his lab with Doris, he makes two drinks which, between the mixing and Bill turning back to get the drinks, the glasses teleport across–not just the table–but the entire room (apparently the newtons of force from the blonde’s slap were still resonating). In relation to the pesky gloves of the set, their counterparts appear during the last scene: Bill’s tie, regardless of how many times he loosens it, scuttles back up to his neck within a matter of seconds as his sleeves roll and unroll at will.
Whew. But then there’s the little known fact that the energy required to sustain a severed head is three volts, that is, two double-D batteries. But I digress yet again. The dialogue in the film is ingenious because screenwriter Rex Carlton attempts to distract the viewer from the above-citied cinematic discrepancies by providing some of the most trite attempts at ironic dialogue. At seemingly every turn, we are presented with some quip pertaining to malevolent doctors with God complexes, “Oh, come on now, Doris. Do I look like a maniac who goes around killing girls?” Always keeping us on our toes, when we aren’t being bombarded with didactic irony, we are guest to heightened philosophic soliloquies from Kurt as he argues with a severed head (apparently not having a left hand creates a huge inferiority complex), “The paths of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculations and often lose themselves in error and darkness!” Of course, we don’t get to see much of Kurt during these speeches because Green positions the laboratory equipment firmly between Daniels and the camera.
Yet, I had to remain focused as a film critic in order to assess all the merits of the production. The acting . . . well the acting is this side of Dennis Rodman’s Razzie-quality performances. Doris, awaiting the cue to be “surprised” when Bill reenters the room with drinks, sits and, as a good little actress, follows her direction to “look bored,” which constitutes darting her eyes back and forth as if she were on amphetamines. Needless to say, Green’s direction is a bit askew. For instance, as we watch Bill driving like a bat out of Hell, the scene cuts to a road sign signaling a foreboding a sharp ninety-degree turn up ahead. Thus, we anticipate that Bill will not make the turn. But he does! Seconds later, in a mishmash of cuts, he crashes. Finally, we have Jan, who is scripted to apparently “laugh hysterically.” She does so only to make the audience’s skin curl due to its proximity to the Wicked Witch of the West’s malicious cackle. This is second only to the score by Abe Baker which, I swear, is a demonic sax version of “White Christmas.”
Aside from the convoluted, aesthetic complexities offered, what else does the film present its attentive viewer? Well, we learn that regardless of how nice a woman is, she will become excessively bitchy once decapitated and, upon waking to find herself in a pan fed by a feeding tube in intervals equitable to sucking the last bits of soda from a Styrofoam cup, she will need to have her mouth taped shut in order to get a word in edgewise. Yes, we are offered a satirical retelling of Frankenstein with the addition of an abject woman who is “without body.” Is this premise explored and artistically presented in an intellectually stimulating manner? Yeah right. Carlton merely creates a premise which will allow Green the opportunity to have the camera ogle over women throughout the duration of the movie. What does the film offer from a socially redeemable perspective? Just one. I can definitely state that Stuart Gordon watched this film because he saw in the horrendous nature of the production how to create a parody of the mad scientist. However, as well as Gordon pokes fun at the genre, Green took his work seriously, which makes it all the more . . . well . . . bad. Overall, the film is dreadful but is nonetheless fun due to its mile-a-minute inconsistencies. With this, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die isn’t tedious but inadvertently amusing.
-Egregious Gurnow
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