The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Year:
1962
Directed by:
Joseph Green
Rated:
NR
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 22 min.
Production Company:
Rex Carlton Productions
Written by:
Rex Carlton
Joseph Green
Starring:
Jason Evers
Virginia Leith
Leslie Daniels
Adele Lamont
Similar Films:
Laughably bad, but not laughable enough.
A talking head, a locked-away monster, ... some talking, and ... yep, that's it. The Brain that Wouldn't Die is another one of those movies that would be so bad it's good if it weren't for the fact that most of it is simply boring.
Dr. Bill Cortner believes he has found, or is on the verge of finding, the key to "complete transplantation," the ability to seamlessly connect any disconnected body part onto any other body with zero tissue rejection. One weekend, he decides to take his lady Jan out to the lab to show her his secret experiments. For no apparent reason, Cortner hilariously blurts out, "I've got to hurry!" in the middle of the drive and begins speeding like a maniac. He should have considered that you can't speed like that into countryside curves because when he hits one it sends his car off the road in a fiery mess. He is thrown clear, but when he runs back to the wreckage he sees his love dying in the flames. What does he do? He calmly pulls her head from the wreckage (it's not clear whether it was decapitated in the wreck or if he somehow gently pulled it from her body) and runs through the woods. Apparently his speeding was even more uncalled-for than we thought because he is able to walk the rest of the way to his cabin-lab. He connects her head to life support and goes off to find a suitable body.
Sounds pretty fun so far, I know, but at this point the story sinks into a big, boring, repetitive rut. Cortner goes out to find a woman with the perfect body, but instead of becoming some twisted psycho woman-hunter, he is just a mean guy carrying on boring conversations with prostitutes and models trying to find the perfect, untraceable prey. Unlike the hysterically self-absorbed woman-hunter in American Psycho or the murderously deviant one in Peeping Tom, for instance, there is nothing interesting about our stalker. This is probably because his motives are not psychological in nature (at least not as the film sees them); they are purely goal-oriented. So, we don't get the stuff that makes those other characters so intriguing: inflated soliloquies, ridiculous fantasies, and disturbing memories, to name but a few. He simply hits on women until he finds one that will work. The only entertaining thing in Cortner's entire search is a brawl that breaks out between two prostitutes.
Alternating between the scenes of Cortner's hunt are scenes of Jan uncannily talking without the use of lungs. Now, this is a little funnier to watch, but it gets old quickly. She is kept in the basement along with an unseen monstrosity (the "sum total of Dr. Cortner's mistakes"), who is locked in his own little cell. In these scenes, we get a lot of two things: her talking to the monster, who communicates by knocking on its door, and her talking to Cortner's assistant, who childishly insults her when she provokes him. You see, Jan is infuriated that her lover would try to preserve her on top of someone else's body. Fair enough I guess, but instead of discussing this in a productive manner, she schemes to kill the scientists that have done this to her, with a little help from the thing locked away. In another unintentionally laugh-out-loud moment, she says to the deformed test subject, "I'm only a head, and you're whatever you are. Together we're strong." It may sound like a long shot, but don't forget: they also have bad writing on their side.
The fact that the they get their own title wrong, as The Head that Wouldn't Die (emphasis added), at the end of the film is a dead giveaway, if the film itself is not, that the filmmakers did not care a whole lot about this movie. I liken The Brain that Wouldn't Die to its horribly misshapen experiment-patient character. It's an ugly thing, and if it has any merits, they lie only in displaying how laughably negligent its caretakers were. When you see it -- and you do get to see the monster at the end of the film -- it does pay off with a few laughs, but it isn't worth the price of admission.
