The Brain That Wouldn't Die!

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) is an old mad scientist shlock-fest, but it has enough subtle, subversive subtext (how do you like that for alliteration?) for even the most jaded and cynical bad movie buff to chew on, like a piece of cheap steak from an all-night greasy spoon circa 1964.

Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is a mad scientist that uses stolen body parts for transplant experiments. We see him in surgery at the beginning of the picture, bringing a stiff back to life by inserting some scissors into his brain. For some reason the head surgeon doesn't like this, and warns him about such "bring the dead back to life, will ya?" foolishness.

His wife or lover or something is Jan the Nurse (Virginia Leith), and she is with him in his hot car when he crashes. She loses her head and he rushes back to his secret lab, where he keeps it alive in a bed pan with suction cups over her ears, a blood tube, an air hose, etc. Anyone who has ever perused the cheapo DVD rack at the local Dollar Store has seen the famous image of Jan's head in the bedpan on a collection of five-buck public domain horror flicks that probably included Carnival of Souls, Bucket of Blood, and, if you lucked out, White Zombie.

At any rate, there's a door in the lab padlocked flimsily with a lock anyone, even a movie monster, could break. And there's a little sliding partition in the center of it. and that's a key plot element, so keep it in mind.

Dr. Bill has an assistant named Kurt (Anthony La Penna) who has a deformed arm because of one of the good doctor's little "mishaps of an experiment. He may be the Super Ego to the floating bed pan head that is the raspy, eerie, whispery, and thoroughly depressed Jan (I mean, who wouldn't be, condemned to spend the rest of their presumably short life floating in a veritable casserole dish of blood?) Showing himself to be the sexist pig he is, Dr. Bill leaves his bodiless wife to go to a tease-o-Rama and watch pulchritudinous 1962 go-g0 girls dance around. He makes love with one, another comes in, gets jealous, and--we're off! Most of the women in this movie are curvaceous and gorgeous in the way women were in the early to mid-Sixties.

It becomes apparent he's after bodies as he cruises down the sidewalk, where the women clack-clack uncomfortably in high heels, curiously, on a suburban sidewalk. He's looking for a...replacement, for what Jane lost.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, Kurt and Jan and the "Thing" behind the door (which occasionally thrusts out one huge hand) all get to talking (well, mostly Kurt and Jan, the Thing just punching the door and grunting a lot), and Jan, reminding us of the evil twin of the fabled British aristocrat Edward Mordake, whispers "evil" things in her raspy voice to It, realizing she can mentally or psychically control it.

She may be, between the terrible thing "behind the door" (i.e. lurking in the subconscious), and the assistant Kurt (urging her to finally kill herself and end it), the disembodied voice of an ego that is so badly damaged, for want of affection from her oversexed, body-obsessed husband, a representation of the plight of modern man, or rather WOman; she attempts to adjust between what may lurk inside (the Beast, desiring freedom and also, retribution), and Kurt, the "Assistant," who is pushing her toward oblivion (because he appreciates Higher Faculties, and what is "good"; i.e., in a Freudian sense, they're one being represented and split into threes).

But that is maybe reading into things a little too deep for this particular flick. Two surprisingly gory killings add an extra fillip of entertainment to the whole. However, on the whole, despite all the hot flesh and monster movie monstrousness on display, I rather rate this picture as mediocre. Worth watching until the end, but the end is predictable. But there is still a subtle subtext here. I think.