It was George Romero’s 70th birthday on Wednesday, so the wife and I celebrated by watching Night of the Living Dead. The original 1968 version, of course. It’s strange how on his birthday we’re the ones who get such a nice present. Anyway, I really love watching old horror movies because, more than anything, they’re good for a laugh. We’re so used to trillion dollar budgets and CGI this and green-screen that nowadays that when we come across something archaic and raw like a movie from the 60s, it seems comical in comparison. And most times it is, but that’s really not the case with Night of the Living Dead.

It’s amazing what superb lighting, clever camera angles, and chocolate syrup can do. I’ll compare Night of the Living Dead to The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (since it’s freshest in my mind), where the latter was shot as though it was a theater performance on film. Everything was stationary and static. The actors moved as if on a stage. Romero’s classic, however, just six years later, shows remarkable visionary achievements. There’s real chills created in the shots alone. Throw some zombies into the mix and it’s one hell of a movie, even if it is 42 years old. It also stands as the benchmark in zombie movie mania (even though the word zombie is never mentioned once in the movie). It is the one. Everything we know and understand about the undead is established in Night of the Living Dead; their penchant for human flesh, how to kill them, the downside of being bitten by one, the confusion and fighting amongst the people trying to avoid being eaten, etc. But I think I’m telling you stuff you already know.

For those that don’t know, here’s how it all started. Siblings Barbara and Johnny are visiting their father’s grave when a zombie attacks them. Barbara escapes, but Johnny isn’t so lucky. Barbara takes shelter at a nearby house whose owner has perished, likely eaten by a zombie. Then this dude, Ben, shows up (he’s also trying to avoid being eaten) and together they board up the house and hope for the best. Actually, Ben does most of the boarding up; Barbara spends the rest of the movie in a catatonic state. Then two dudes pop out of the basement. They had also taken shelter in the house and had been hiding in the basement with their women (and a sick child) until the madness was over. Well, the madness is only escalating. They turn on the TV and the radio to learn about the mass murders sweeping the land at the hands of the undead, or ghouls, likely due to some radioactive contaminants from an exploded space probe.

So the people in the house argue over how to proceed and finally they decide that some of them will try for a bone dry car, fill it up at the house’s gas pump, and then grab everyone else and make a break for it. It was a good plan in theory, but it didn’t quite work out, and now the zombies have made their way into the house and the sick girl in the basement wants in on the flesh-eating action. The only one left by sun-up is Ben, but when the local authorities make their zombie-killing rounds, they shoot Ben because they think he’s a zombie. Oops.

There you have it, the grandfather of all zombie movies, and while it has a few are-you-kidding-moments, it’s nowhere near the kind of chuckle-fest most of these old horror movies are prone to be. No, Night of the Living Dead is a masterful, original, apocalyptic triumph concerning the reanimation of the recently dead. Fuck yeah.

So you know what you’re going to do now, right? Yeah, you’re going to watch Night of the Living Dead right here!

First off, I have to address the title. Calling the movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die makes it seem like said brain is out of control and cannot be killed; that the brain just won’t die. But that’s not the case. The brain, or rather, the nice lady whose head is housing the brain, wants to die. It’s the doctor who is keeping her — and her brain — alive. The brain would easily, and no doubt gladly, die if they let it. So saying it wouldn’t die is a tad misleading. Perhaps a more appropriate name for the movie would be The Brain That Wants To Die or The Brain They Won’t Let Die. I don’t want you going into this one thinking it’s about an unstoppable killer brain terrorizing people. It’s not. But in a movie fraught with ridiculous, mind-boggling sequences, the misleading title hardly casts a shadow.

What lays beyond the title is a surgeon who has been experimenting with transplants in his spare time, but something has gone wrong at his country mansion where he weekends and practices his crack science. One of his “experiments,” a grotesque mash-up of human bits and pieces, has run amok, and has been locked in a closet by the surgeon’s assistant. In a mad rush to get to his mansion, the surgeon drives off the road and is thrown from his car. His car is engulfed in flames, trapping his girlfriend inside who was coming along for the ride. Instead of pulling her out of the burning wreckage he decides to just take her head instead.

Now, this is where things come a bit undone, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s the are-you-kidding-me factor in movies like this. You see, as the surgeon approaches the car, we see the girl holding out her hand as if reaching for assistance. Yet our good doctor just reaches into the flames and comes away with her head. He clearly didn’t cut the head off because there’s no knife and no cutting motion, so I guess the body, without its head, was still alive, like what can happen with a chicken? That’s the only explanation for why she was reaching out for help. Now, if that was the case, why not save her body too?

I know what you’re thinking. He didn’t save the body because it would’ve been all burned up. Ah, but the head came away perfectly unscathed. Look at it! She even still has her make-up on! No burns, no blood. If he had grabbed the body when he grabbed the head it surely would’ve been in tip-top shape too. So, the only conclusion we can come to now is that he left the body on purpose so he could experiment with just the head. Yes, with just a head he is free to find a new, presumably sexier body, for his girlfriend and make significant strides in his work by transplanting a head on to a new body.

Which brings us to the doctor’s search for that new body. After he has set up his girlfriend’s head in his lab so that it may live, he sets out to caterwaul and womanize in the hopes of scoring a sweet body for the transplant. I don’t know what kind of country his country mansion is in, but he’s a quick drive (yeah, I know, his car was wrecked, but he has a country mansion, so I’m sure he has more than one car) from a bar/restaurant with dancing burlesque girls, a swimsuit beauty contest, and a figure model’s loft. He settles on the figure model because she hides a horrible scar on her face and is willing to come back to the mansion with the promise of a new face to go along with her wonderful body. Little does she know what that actually entails.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, the head has become aware of itself and quickly vows to seek revenge on the man who has left her in this freakish state. Seriously, it doesn’t take any time adjusting or being scared or whatever else you might expect it to do upon realizing that it’s floating in a dish of special serum without a body. Eyes open and…revenge! That’s it. So, it starts using its brain to communicate with the monster in the closet. Together they decide that with his body and her mind they can end the doctor’s cruel experiments once and for all. She has some face-to-face (ha!) time with the nervous assistant (who himself needs work done on his deformed hand) where they discuss the morality of what the doctor is doing, but in the end the doctor returns with his body, the monster breaks out of the closet (hey, I can see where your mask ties up along the back), and all hell breaks loose, as it were.

Despite the hackneyed continuity and implausible plot points, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, for its time, was a current and frightening look into the world of medicine and transplants. There’s an obvious Frankenstein correlation here, so the idea of experimenting with tissue reanimation wasn’t anything new, but this movie came out at a time when modern medicine was starting to understand and accomplish a lot more in the field of transplantation. I recommend The Brain That Wouldn’t Die for not only its bad fun, but also because it’s a great reference point if you’ve ever seen (and if you haven’t you should) the awesomely terrible classic, Frankenhooker.

Normally I’d encourage you to check out the trailer for The Brain That Wouldn’t Die but just click here and watch the whole thing instead!