The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962)

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Some movies endure because they’re good. Then there are the others… Movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, which blends amateur filmmaking with a delirious premise and ends up coated in Grand Guignol hilarity. The body horror merely begins when a mad scientist’s girlfriend is decapitated by a car accident—he manages to preserve the head (in a liquid-filled tray), then goes hunting for a replacement body, settling for nothing less than a glamour model. While meant as horror, the film becomes a comedy for anyone past the age of ten thanks to over-the-top histrionics, baffling creative decisions (such as the protagonist grabbing his girlfriend’s decapitated head and just… running with it) and amateurish filmmaking such as the (cat)fight between two strippers that uses meows as sound effects. Plus, hey, a bit of chaste pin-up burlesque to round off the bases of early-1960s exploitation. And have I mentioned the telepathy? It’s all terrible and somehow quite entertaining even if the film itself is bottom-of-the-barrel nonsense. Much of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die’s popularity is due not only to its innate deficiencies, but to its accidental placement in the public domain, which ensured that dozens of distributors would make endless copies fit for late-night broadcast. Ironically, there’s a ferocious critique of misogyny accidentally hidden in the film’s portrayal of a monstrous mad scientist reducing his girlfriend to disconnected parts. The Brain that Wouldn’t Die is a piece of cinema history all right (an early gory effort, even as timid as it looks these days) and certainly not a respectable one. Later visually quoted in Re-Animator, Frankenhooker and countless others—which gives you an idea of how ahead of its time it was, even if unintentionally.