Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The (1959)

Dr and Dr Cortner, a father and son team, are the main doctors of a city hospital. The younger Cortner, a grumpy, obsessive and arrogant young man, is frustrated by what he believes is his father’s antiquated and obsolete surgical techniques. He feels his father has lost the urge to experiment and discover.

In the opening scenes, the senior Dr Cortner cannot save a patient and pronounces the man dead and ready to be taken to the morgue. The younger Cortner pleads with Dad to allow him to try his luck on the corpse, explaining that he could hardly harm something already deceased. The senior Dr. looks on in astonishment as Bill manages to perform the miracle of life, and sure enough, the dead man is restored to life, albeit with complications. Buoyed by his success, Bill Cortner plans to perform all sorts of transplants from the limbs he has secretly collected from various corpses. Elated, he races to his countryside laboratory with his beautiful fiancé to proceed with his Frankenstein-like experiments. Alas on the way, his haste gets the better of him (and her), and he suffers a nasty crash which results in the decapitation of his fiancé.

In a mad frenzy, he carries back her head and manages by some fantastic method (Adreno-serum) to keep the chopped body part alive in a tray. Meanwhile, he has to rush around the sleazier parts of town, searching for the perfect body as a replacement. There are some marvellous scenes in a fleapit go-go joint where the Babe’s delightfully cheap and willing. Bill finds a lusting nymphomaniac about to have him for breakfast, lunch and dinner when plans go awry. A magnificent catfight ensues, worth the entry money on its own. Meanwhile, the fiancé’s head lies in the tray, kept alive so that Bill can perform his fangled transplant operation. The head keeps pleading, “Let me die”,…..but Bill’s obsession will have none of it.

Slowly the head begins to discover that it can communicate and also to arouse a revolutionary passion within the limbs behind that mysterious door. The limbs that the doctor had been collecting for his experiments. Limbs that are pissed off at being locked up and not being allowed to rest in peace. The head has an axe to grind and finds the perfect ally behind the door behind the assembled body parts. “He should have killed me,” says the fiancé’s head as it begins to plot a hideous revenge on its tormentor. “together we will wreak our revenge…I shall create power, and you shall enforce it,” threatens the talking head in a highly chilling fashion.

This mini-epic is the grandson of the Frankenstein/mad scientist genre and the great uncle of modern classics such as Re-Animator. The acting is suitably jammy for a low-budget cheapie, which this is. However, the gore effects reinserted for this special edition DVD version are quite startling, even if they are in black and white. The bit where the rambling assemblage of amputated limbs bites a chunk from Dr Cortner’s neck is a scream.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is vintage, campy horror with its tongue discreetly hidden in the cheek. Not to be missed by serious scholars of the horror and cult genres.