The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

It's Week 2 of Spooky Season and after last weeks genuinely nice surprise with The Haunting Of Whaley House I'm moving on this week to arguably one of the worst movies I've ever watched. The Brain That Wouldn't Die, from 1962, is this weird and slightly unsettling low budget horror movie about a mad scientist preserving the severed head of his fiancée in a desperate attempt to keep her alive. I've actually watched this before although my watch of it predates this blog, and it was honestly not very good back then so I am going into this with some preconceptions, but I wanted to add it to the collection on the blog here and when the fuck am I going to get a better opportunity than during Spooky Season to talk about this one? Probably never.

The movie opens with Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) effectively bringing a patient at the hospital back to life with experimental surgery involving electrical brain stimulation, despite the protestations of his colleagues. In the ensuing debate / argument, Bill reveals he's the one who has been stealing limbs from the amputee department...! Limbs needed for his transplant experiments as Bill dreams of being able to replace arms and legs on patients that would adapt as if they were born with them. As Bill and his fiancée Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) are making the journey to Bill's family Country House, the pair are involved in a car accident, down to Bill's careless driving. From the burning wreckage, using his jacket, Bill retrieves a suspiciously large enough sized bundle of something... something that leaks blood... that he carries under his arm as he stumbles his way to the country house. Crashing inside and calling for the help of his in-house assistance Kurt (Anthony La Penna), the pair quickly get to work in the in-house laboratory and after rigging up an assembly of scientific and medical equipment are able to successfully revive the severed head of Jan Compton! Kept alive inside a baking tray on the desk! As Jan mumbles "let me die." Bill announces his desire to find her a new body as Kurt tries to make him understand just how mad and diabolical what he is planning to do actually is. Before he leaves to find his fiancée a new figure, Kurt implores Bill to check the closet in the lab where they are keeping some snarling, whimpering monster under lock and key... Bill pays a visit to the local Moulin Rouge (!) where, after having a good, old letch at some of the girls, he does a bit of window shopping before presumably leaving. Back inside the lab, coming to terms with what's happened to her Jan tries to barter with the creature inside the closet and convinces it that together, they can take their revenge on Bill for what he's done to them. When Kurt comes down to see what all the noise is about, he explains to Jan that the creature locked inside the closet is a humanoid put together from amputated limbs and body parts brought back to life by Dr. Cortner, and that he too was experimented on with Dr. Cortner trying to restore his amputated arm but was the result of an experimental failure and left with a withered lifeless hand. When Kurt explains to Jan that the experimental serum that keeps her alive was first tested only on her, Jan eludes to the fact that it has somehow given her a telekinetic power that she can use to control the creature in the closet and after demonstrating, sufficiently scares Kurt enough that he scampers away. The following morning Bill heads out and does a bit of kerb crawling and ends up with some old female schoolfriends at a "body beautiful" contest where he learns that one of his old girlfriends, Doris Powell was significantly disfigured in an accident but still has "the best body you'd ever see." He goes to pay Doris (Adele Lamont) a visit and after she sends the squad of photographers packing, reveals her disfigurement to Bill; it transpires to be a scar on the side of her head, hidden behind her hair... Bill woo's her into believing that advancements in plastic surgery mean he can make her beautiful again and Doris is brought round into believing him. Meanwhile back at the lab, after Kurt and Jan get into an argument, Jan challenges Kurt to open the closet and release the creature inside, as Kurt is almost goaded into doing it, the creature reaches through a gap and rips Kurt's amputated arm off. When Bill and Doris return, Bill discovers his bloodied corpse slumped against the wall and drags him to one side before fixing up a drink to incapacitate poor Doris. After she drinks up, and flakes out, Bill carries her into the lab and gets the operation under way despite Jan's protestations. He ends up taping her mouth shut! But that doesn't stop Jan from utilizing her new telekinetic powers to force the creature inside the closet to break out, incapacitating Bill in the process and causing a fire to break out in the lab. As the beast lumbers away, he scoops up an unconscious Doris from the table and carries her out of the room. As the flames begin to creep around the desk, Jan mutters "I told you to let me die"...

Yeah... this hasn't got any better with the confluence of time to be honest. Before this blog was even a thing I used to talk about this as one of the worst movies I've ever seen and it's still pretty high up on that list, incredibly, but I have since gone on to watch much, much worse things. Not that this was comparatively good though, because it wasn't. For a movie who's focus is a such a macabre and taboo subject matter; the preservation of a severed head, even by modern day standards I think, it somehow manages to be equally unsettling and boring I think in almost even amounts. Lot's of dialogue and preachy diatribes and not much in the way of actual plot or character development. Not much in the way of characters really... let alone their development. This was just not very good at all.

Some positives though, there was some fairly decent cinematography, and the movie took advantage of utilising some interesting framing and sequences to amplify the *ahem* "horror" of what was unfolding. And when they had to use a particular camera angle in order to mask something from the viewer it was done fairly cleverly and executed fairly well. For all it's other faults, I can't complain about the way the movie was shot and for the most part that was all done fairly well and above average for an otherwise low budget movie.

Conversely everything else was pretty much sub-par at best, and failing into dangerously poor at worst. The soundtrack, despite not being at fault technically - quite the opposite actually, the musical pieces were all fairly decent and well produced - was otherwise hamfistedly slapped on and there was this really ill-fitting and totally un-suitable bluesy jazz number that was played whenever Bill was out on the search for another body. It was just completely cheesy and totally inappropriate for the scenes that were being portrayed! Was more the kind of thing you hear in a burlesque bar, or during a scene where a suitably attractive lady is trying to seduce a man. Not for a Doctor kerb crawling looking for his potential murder victim!

Acting-wise, let's not even go there... nobody is coming out of this unscathed. Jason Evers was all over the place skipping from well mannered, well spoken gentleman one moment to doing a terrible impression of a mad scientist at the next moment and had zero fascial expressions or zero character to really emphasize what a deranged character he was supposed to be. Equally Virginia Leith as Jan Compton went from a naïve Nurse to a philosophical wordsmith after her character was transformed into a detached head and it just felt completely ill fitting and almost diluting of the scenario she was supposed to be experiencing. Both were pretty much the central characters and responsible for carrying the movie, but I feel both were horribly miscast and / or didn't really understand the assignment.

Another slight bone of contention is that the whole movie kind of intermittently builds up the horror and suspense of what is behind the closet door only for it to be revealed to be a freakishly disfigured giant of man in literally the last 3 minutes of the movie. And whilst the make-up and effects look a little dated by modern standards, they were ok really for the time. But it did feel massively anticlimactic when all he did was lumber around a bit before scooping up the lady from the table and carrying her out the room. He didn't even really take out his pent up frustration on Bill, he just... sent him crashing into the opposite wall and collapsing to the floor. Properly underwhelming and basically just a means to an end in order for the experiment at the end to be foiled and for 'karma' -in a sense - to prevail.

And it doesn't really get better with the plot, if you can really say that the movie had one. The first 15 odd minutes are the accident and Bill announcing his plan, the middle section of the movie is essentially Bill sizing up a victim whilst Jan does alot of preaching from her baking tray prison and then the final 10 minutes is the "crescendo" with the creature breaking out and ending the movie. In between is fairly dialogue heavy but I think you could succinctly tie the whole events and narrative of the movie up in about 25-30 minutes and the additional 40 odd minutes is essentially just padding and filler. For a body-horror movie about a severed head, it struggled to really maintain your interest once you get passed the macabre premise and I found it difficult really to pay attention during most of the dialogue heavy bits.

I don't use the phrase trash very often to describe a movie but I feel like this one was a very good example of 60's horror 'trash'. And I'm not using that phrase disingenuously, but it had it's one central hook: this is a movie about a mad scientist bringing a head back to life, and then really struggled to build an interesting and entertaining movie around that premise. I feel like there was a bit of effort; the cinematography was decent and the soundtracking was decent if not incorrectly utilised but I feel like there wasn't enough of an story to really fill this one out and enough of a script to really get the characters in the movie talking and acting like they were supposed to talk. Maybe that part was intentional? Not really sure to be honest? But as a result the cocktail of all those parts just produced a slightly unsettling and odd but simultaneously tedious and boring body horror sci-fi movie. It doesn't even really stray into so bad it's good; morbid curiosity territory really. It just wasn't and isn't a good movie. Weak 1 out of 5.