The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

Описание: Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) has been performing unethical experimental surgery on human guinea pigs without authorization and against the advice of his father (Bruce Brighton), also a surgeon. When Bill saves a patient who had been pronounced dead, the senior surgeon, Bill's father, condemns his son's unorthodox methods, and theories of transplanting and keeping human body parts alive.

While driving to his family's country house, Bill and his beautiful fiancée Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) become involved in a car-accident that decapitates her. Bill recovers her severed head and rushes to his country house basement laboratory. He and his crippled assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna credited as Leslie Daniel) revive the head in a liquid-filled tray. But Jan's new existence is agony, and she begs Bill to let her die. He ignores her pleas, and she grows to resent him.

Bill now needs to find a new body for his bride-to-be and decides to commit murder to obtain one for Jan. He hunts for a suitable specimen at a burlesque nightclub. When the blonde and brunette strippers start wrestling, the camera pans to pictures of cats on the wall to show that they are having a "catfight."

While Bill searches on the streets, and at a beauty-contest, Jan begins communicating telepathically with a hideous, lumbering mutant, from one of this mad doctor's earlier experiments gone wrong, locked in a laboratory cell. When Kurt leaves a hatch in the cell door unlocked, the monster grabs and tears off Kurt's arm. Kurt dies from his injuries.

Bill lures an old girlfriend, figure-model Doris Powell (Adele Lamont), to his house, promising to study her scarred face for plastic surgery. He drugs her and carries her to the laboratory. Jan protests Bill's plan to transplant her head onto Doris's body. He tapes Jan's mouth shut.

When Bill goes to quiet the monster, it grabs Bill through the hatch and breaks the door from its hinges. Their struggles set the laboratory ablaze. The monster, a seven-foot giant with a horribly deformed head, bites a chunk from Bill's neck. Bill dies, and the monster carries the unconscious Doris to safety. As the lab goes up in flames, Jan says "I told you to let me die". The screen goes black, followed by Jan's maniacal cackle, welcoming her long awaited death.

A 1962 American science fiction horror B-movie (a/k/a "The Head That Wouldn't Die" or "The Brain That Couldn't Die") directed by Joseph Green, produced by Rex Carlton, written by Green and Carlton, cinematography by Stephen Hajnal, starring Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Anthony La Penne, Adele Lamont, Bonnie Share, Paula Morris, Marilyn Hanold, and Bruce Kerr. Released by American International Pictures.

The monster in the closet was played, in his first cinematic role, by Eddie Carmel, a well-known Mandatory Palestine-born circus performer, who worked under the name "The Jewish Giant". He was the subject of a photograph by Diane Arbus, titled "The Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970. One of the men snapping photos of Doris in her studio is Sammy Petrillo, a Jerry Lewis imitator and co-star of "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla" (1952).

One bright aspect of the film is the sax music which resonates strongly every time the mad doctor scours town for a female body to crown his girlfriend's head on.

Shot in 13 days, independently around Tarrytown, New York, in 1959 under the working title "The Black Door". The title was changed to "The Head That Wouldn't Die". Some prints use both the opening title "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" and the closing title "The Head That Wouldn't Die".

Virginia Leith hated the film so much she refused to return for post-production. A few of her lines were dubbed by Doris Brent. Upon the death of Virginia Leith, her body was donated to medical science at the UCLA Medical School.

The film was completed in 1959 under the working title "The Black Door" but was not theatrically released until May 3, 1962, under its new title, by Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures as a double feature with with "Invasion of the Star Creatures" (1962) or "Night of the Eagle" (1962). It was re-released later that year as the theatrical co-feature with Roger Corman's "Tales of Terror" (1962).

This shares several key plot devices with the West German horror film "The Head" (1959). Specifically, a mad doctor who discovers a way to keep a human head alive had been used in fiction earlier, such as "Professor Dowell's Head" (1925) by Russian author Aleksandr Belyaev, which was produced later, "Zaveshchaniye professora Douelya" (1984).

Issues abound about what role science and medicine have in our lives and what their boundaries should be. This film is a thinking film in many ways, and works for its sheer audacity and shameless full-bore conviction of its aims. Listed among The 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made, in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book, The Official Razzie® Movie Guide.