The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1959/1962)
Grade: D+
As the curtain rises on this campy, turgid exploitation flick (which was finished in '59 but took three years to find a distributor), we hear a quivering woman's voice pleading "Let me die...let me die!..."
But the title refuses:
(No! That's German for "The brain that wouldn't, the.")
Within moments we're transported to an operating room, where a patient lies dying while Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers aka Herb Evers), a brash young physician, is having a battle of wills with his conservative, safety-first father (Bruce Brighton). When the patient expires on the operating table, the elder Dr. Cortner relinquishes command, giving Bill a chance to put his bold new ideas into practice:
("I'm going to make panko-crusted brains with a fruit candy gastrique and a bitter melon salad.")
Dr. Bill revives the patient, with the help of a little bit of electricity and a hearty dose of chutzpah. Nonetheless, he earns a stern lecture from Dad for his arrogance in treating medicine like a game, experimenting on people, indulging in reckless transplants (hint hint!), and a laundry list of other behaviors designed to set up the younger Dr. Cortner as the epitome of the post-Frankenstein physician.
(Dr. Bill gets the Henry Rush treatment.)
After a few Oedipal minutes, Bill's fiancée Jan (Virginia Leith) injects herself into the conversation. We learn of their plan to spend a quiet weekend at the Cortners' country house, prompting the elder Cortner to exclaim how "you're always sneaking off up there...the place gives me the creeps -- I should have sold it when your mother died."
The younger Cortner immediately gets uptight --"You can't sell that place!" -- and then backpedals: "Well, I mean, it's nice to get away from the city, I can work without anyone snooping around." Subtle stuff!
(This picture summarizes the family dynamic pretty well: consternation, adoration, self-admiration.)
Shortly thereafter, Bill gets news that he's urgently needed at the country place because, according to his assistant Kurt (Leslie Daniels), "something terrible has happened". So they hit the road, and Bill puts the pedal to the proverbial, ignoring numerous and ominous warning signs (in the most literal sense of the phrase).
(Aaaaaaaaand.) (With apologies to Sir Paul.)
The predictable accident happens, and Bill is thrown clear. He staggers back over to the burning car, and with a look of horror on his face, sees Jan still trapped inside. Her hand is raised, then drops out of the frame...it seems all is lost...but wait, what did Bill just wrap in his jacket?
("You were in a car crash, and you lost your..." With apologies to, uh, Member Ringo.)
Well, whatever that parcel is, he proceeds to sprint home with it tucked under his arm, prompting an extended scene with no dialogue that resembles nothing so much as a grotesque touchdown run.
(Remember not to spike it when you reach the end zone.)
And well, you've probably guessed what happens next, in the basement laboratory:
(Also sprach Frau Leith: "Think of the money...think of the money...")
"What's done is done, and what I've done is right," says Bill, despite the scruples of his assistant Kurt -- who, we soon learn, has himself been one of Bill's experimental transplant subjects, with less than successful results:
(Too soon to make a Dick Clark joke here?)
The "terrible" event in Kurt's message turns out to be an unspecified experiment, now locked in a closet, and which has apparently turned into something too horrible to show onscreen...yet.
Meanwhile, Jan (who's still unconscious) can only live as a severed head for around 48 hours, so Bill goes out in search of a donor body. Cue some sexy, sexy sax music as Bill heads into a sleazy club, surveys the goods on display, and soon ends up backstage with the star attraction, an "exotic" dancer who may or may not also be a prostitute:
("I need to save my fiancée, but while I'm at it, how 'bout some VD?")
However, folks tend to notice when a high-class guy like Bill comes into a cheap joint, and our sexy, sexy dancer has a rival who's equally interested:
(Pining for the mesa, perhaps?)
The rival's arrival ruins everything since Bill doesn't want to leave any witnesses, so he takes off, and a ridiculous catfight ensues:
(Indeed a fight, though in still shots it looks more like the prelude to a kiss we don't especially want to see.)
Just to make sure we get the message, in what may be one of the greatest cutaways in cinematic history, at the end of the fight the filmmakers insert a shot of two painted cats, with an overdubbed "Meow!" Seriously.
Right around now, Jan wakes up and -- despite not having any lungs -- begins to soliloquize. Apparently the process has somehow transformed Jan, as on the one hand she's consumed with hate, furious at Bill for keeping her alive in this horrible state, while on the other she seems to have developed some sort of nascent psychic power.
After Jan speaks with the creature in the closet for a while (who communicates back with dull thumps), Kurt returns. Their stilted conversation has Jan offering up plenty of stagy, overbaked lines:
"Like all quantities, horror has its ultimate, and I am that!" and
"He may produce results he didn't ask for...results more terrible than your arm of relative beauty."
This is the basic template for The Brain That Wouldn't Die: 33% preachy soliloquizing, 33% sexy sax with soft-pedal smut, and 33% suspenseful string tremolos with occasional gore. (The remaining 1% owns the rest of the movie, via several holding corporations in the Cayman Islands.)
Since two-thirds of that formula involves little or no dialogue, you can't really call the movie "talky". But it sure does start to drag, especially when Bill goes out for his second and third attempts at finding Jan a body. Cue the sexy sax, of course.
("I've got kind of a third-rate Paul Newman thing going on here, you know?")
After leering at female pedestrians for a while, he bumps into a woman he knows...
("...and with a little work, I think you could be the spitting image of Marie Antoinette.")
...who, no joke, invites him to a "Best Body" beauty contest that just happens to be going on. How serendipitous!
(More sexy ladies. Ever notice how older movies often cast women with widely-spaced eyes for trashier roles? Is there some ethnic subtext there?)
It becomes clear that Bill's main priorities for finding Jan a new body can be summarized by the 20th and 1st letters of the alphabet. You'd think he'd be in the right place for that already, but when Bill's lady friend notes that one of the contestants has the "second-nicest body I've ever seen", it piques his curiosity enough to leave so as to track down #1, a former figure model whom they both knew in school: Doris Powell.
Doris (played by Adele Lamont) has become a semi-recluse since an unspecified accident, but still poses for creepy, overenthusiastic men in order to pay the bills:
(The male gaze in its most vigorous throes.)
When approached by Bill, Doris is prickly at best, proclaiming in the finest Dworkinian manner that "I still hate all men!" And it's hard to really blame her since, it turns out, her "accident" was actually an attack by a jealous boyfriend that left one side of her face badly scarred:
(Her secret shame, revealed. She's still the best-looking broad in the movie, though.)
"Am I so appealing to you now? Doesn't it make you sick?" she asks bitterly. But Bill insists he's not on the make, reminding her that he's a doctor (and his father a plastic surgeon, which makes the opening scene seem a bit strange since plastic surgeons aren't usually first-line trauma doctors), and offering his help. She's cynical about her chances for treatment, but he talks persuasively about recent advancements in the field and whatnot...and before you know it, she's agreed to come to the country house that night for a consult.
And then we hit the head (of Jan) again, who's coaching the unseen beast to kill Kurt. We don't mind too much, since Kurt seems to be the focal point for most of the movie's stultifying soliloquies.
(Soon your self-justifying speeches will end.)
Carnage ensues in the basement lab, which Bill discovers after ensconcing Doris in the upstairs living room. But he's not too fazed, and pours himself and Doris a drink.
(By now the viewer needs one of these too.)
But he puts a little something extra in Doris's glass, just as she's learned to trust again (alas, the irony). She remains conscious for long enough to realize she's been drugged, but at least Bill doesn't tell her why.
(Yep, he slipped you a mickey. But hey, at least it's not The Human Centipede, right?)
Before long, Doris is on the operating table, and Bill is ready to start the procedure to graft Jan's head onto her body. Bill makes a vague attempt at sustaining the pretense of doing this out of love for Jan, but when she warns him that he "must be stopped", he summarily tapes her mouth shut so that it won't disrupt his concentration for the procedure.
(Insert trenchant commentary on gender dynamics here.)
But hell hath no fury like a psychic, decapitated woman with tape over her mouth (as Aaron Burr learned to his great chagrin), and soon the unseen is seen and onscreen:
("No, Brady P. is my cousin, but I get that a lot.")
So what do we do with The Brain That Wouldn't Die? These days it's not titillating enough to titillate, not horrifying enough to horrify, and certainly not scintillating enough to scintillate. And of course, the concept and execution are too stupid to support any nascent hopes of passing it off as a black comedy, despite one or two feints in that direction.
But with a few surprises and a few memorable moments, one could do worse than The Brain That Wouldn't Die for idle, trashy entertainment. And there's always this:
(This one shot, and its accompanying sound effect, justify the entirety of human cinema.)
(Well, almost.)
