# Brain That Wouldn't Die, The (1962)

### reviewed by
Shane Burridge

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) 92m.

For bad-movie lovers only. Hopeless horror pic, also known as THE HEAD THAT WOULDN'T DIE truly comes a cropper, aided in no small part by The Brain That Couldn't Direct and The Cast That Couldn't Act. After an offscreen car crash, neurosurgeon-cum-mad scientist Dr Cortner (Jason Evers) somewhat casually relieves his girlfriend of her head and keeps it alive in his basement laboratory (the kind of setup that you already know is going to go up in flames during the picture's climax). Arguing with her that "I want you as a complete woman, not part of one" - did I mention that the head always has to have the last word? - he roams the town in search of the "right" body for his love (played by Virginia Leith, a discovery of Stanley Kubrick's). As his search concentrates primarily on seedy nightclubs, beauty contests, and sleazy photography classes, it's not hard to gauge just what "right" means in this doctor's book.

Writer-Director Joseph Green's static direction (he has no idea how to stage extras or action), the boring, empty sets, and the amateur cast (as Cortner's girlfriend, Leith is required to act only from the neck up, an instruction Green appears to have inadvertently given the rest of the cast as well) make most of BRAIN very dull. The outright stupidity of the production is entertaining at first, but becomes tiresome until the closing sequences - it picks up during Cortner's lab assistant's ridiculously protracted death scene (although this is cropped in some versions). Because the narrative is so nonsensical it's easy to miss how tacky the film's agenda really is. Women are objects - all that matters is how they look, whether they are burlesque dancers, models, or beauty contestants. When two women get involved in a brawl Green has their room decorated with pictures of cats, and adds a meow at the end of the fight just in case we didn't pick up the joke. Leith stands out as the only character that is totally independent - even while a disembodied head, she is in service to no-one. Without a body, she isn't beauty, but 'brains' - it is only in this state that she stops being the doctor's obliging girlfriend and becomes his critic instead (he even has to gag her at one point). To Green (and the doctor) body = object = control, which explains the change in the characters' relationship. In other hands, these ideas might have been teased out to create a much more coherent and interesting film, but Green's cardboard characters and lazy, juvenile script pretty much put paid to that idea. Instead, it's just lousy.

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE is one of Mystery Science Theater 3000's targets for spoofing. As is usually the case, their own absurd dialogue doesn't get much worse than the original's (for example, the moment when Dr Cortner takes over another surgeon's patient, peels back his scalp, cuts open his skull, and plugs wires into his brain, assuaging any worries the surgical team might have by telling them "I've been working on something like this for weeks"!). If MST3K want a real challenge, they should take on GONE WITH THE WIND

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