I was thinking about starting a ‘From the Vaults’ feature where once a month I would tell you all about a B movie treasure you simply must check out, but that’s an awfully lame name for such a feature, and I don’t exactly write about new movies anyway, so everything is from a vault of some kind, so to speak. So, no label. Just the usual strange and wonderful trip through celluloid city you’ve come to love and expect here. That being said, how does a sci-fi horror where a woman’s head is kept alive in the hopes that a fringe surgeon can give her a new body sound? If that sounds like a delicious piece of bad candy, you’re in luck, because that’s the 1962 classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die!

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!