Review of The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) by Alex K — 18 Apr 2010

You have to hand it to the makers of this cult classic, this really is quite an undertaking. It has one of the most bizarre plots ever: young and slightly unhinged doctor - 'I've got to have limbs to work with!' - is involved in a car crash with his wife and manages to save his wife's severed head by wrapping it in a blanket and running home with it, keeping it alive in some sort of baking tray in his basement (subsequently referred to in movie folklore as Jan in the Pan.) Unsurprisingly, Jan's not too happy about the arrangement but her quiet cries to her husband to 'let me die, let me die' fall on deaf ears so she start plotting with a monster behind a bolted door to get her revenge on her husband. As you do.

All the while her caring husband is out doing the honourable thing and trawling strip clubs, curbs and beauty contests looking for the perfect body to graft onto her decapitated head. There's something delightfully creepy about these sequences, most notably a catfight that ends with a slow pan to a picture of two cats on the wall and a gratuitous 'miaow' on the soundtrack. When the good doctor does finally manage to persuade a girl to come back to his place he successfully assuages her concerns by asking her 'Do I look like a maniac who goes around killing girls?'. Perhaps the greatest thing about this film is that you really do get the feeling that the cast and filmmakers believed in this story and thought they were making a great film. I suppose in many ways they were. It's certainly memorable.

The monster at the end is worth a comment for being genuinely and surprisingly scary. He is played by The Jewish Giant Eddie Carmel, who is most famous for being the subject of a wonderful Diane Arbus photograph 'Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in The Bronx'.

My favourite quote from the film (or the one that I managed to write down, there are quite a few) sums up the films incoherence and peculiarity, it's delivered by the doctor's assistant, he of the deformed and withered hand who in an unfortunate twist of fate gets his other arm bitten off in the final sequence. This is the quote:

'There is a horror beyond yours and it's in there locked behind that door - paths of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculation and often lose themselves in error and darkness'.

Indeed.