The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

My introduction to this flick is comprised of two distinct memories. The first is how, some time while I was in early middle school, I saw the very beginning on Sci-Fi Channel, namely the opening credits and the first scene in the operating room, before turning the channel (don't ask me why). The other, which is far more vivid, is when a clip from it was shown on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, during a game of Film Dub. It was a scene of a man with a deformed hand talking with a woman's head in a dish, before his arm gets gruesomely ripped off by a monster that reaches out through a slat in a door (even while watching the actual movie now, I can't help but think of Colin Mochrie yelling, "Buy an encyclopedia! Buy an encyclopedia!"). I can't recall when I learned that the latter was from this film but, regardless, that was all I did know about it until I finally saw the whole movie... which, despite its public domain status, wasn't until 2024. As you've likely guessed by this point before I've even said it, this was another Blu-Ray I bought off that vendor at G-Fest, but I didn't get around to it until that November. When I did, I actually ended up watching it twice in one day, as one of the extra features was the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that featured it (not the first time I've done that with these Scream Factory releases, either). And while I'm not an MST3K devotee by any means, having only seen a handful of episodes when I was younger and revisiting them when they appear as these kinds of special features, I can say that episode proved to me that I find Joe a lot more entertaining than Mike. I should probably cut Mike some slack, since that was his very first episode, and I've been told he improved as he went on, but I found his delivery and overall demeanor to be lackluster and bored. But, regardless, I can also say that this was another movie I bought from that vendor that turned out to be a dud overall. It starts out well enough, and doesn't waste time in getting to the real crux of the plot, but once that's established, it really meanders around for nearly the entire hour it has left, with even the scenes with "Jan in the pan" not even being that entertaining. It's definitely more violent than you would expect for a movie from this period, not to mention sultry, and the music score is definitely memorable, but on the whole, it's a dull talk-fest.

(And just a heads up, no pun intended, I know there was a remake released in 2020, but I'm not going to review that, at least not for right now. You got those modern day follow-ups/remakes of The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster, but I'm drawing the line at what I've heard is a shot-for-shot remake. As if this movie needed the Gus Van Sant treatment.)

When Dr. Cortner fails to save a patient of his on the operating table, he reluctantly allows his son to try his own, very unorthodox method of resuscitation. To his shock and amazement, Bill manages to get the man's heart beating again. Still, Cortner doesn't agree with his son's radical theories and experiments, especially his belief that he can successfully transplant entire limbs and organs from one body to another. Just as he and his fiancee, Jan Compton, are about to leave to spend the weekend together, Bill is told of an important phone message from a man named Kurt, asking him to come up to his family's large country house, where Bill has conducted his experiments. He and Jan head up there, only for Bill's reckless driving and the curving road proving to be a disastrous combination. He crashes through a guardrail on a sharp curve, and while he's thrown clear, he heads back to the burning wreckage to find that Jan has been decapitated. Gathering her severed head, he rushes to the house and there, in the laboratory down in the basement, he and Kurt, his assistant, manage to revive her using an apparatus and a special serum that Bill has devised. Now, Bill intends to give her a new body by murdering the first good-looking woman he can persuade to come to the house alone, but he only has two days before Jan dies for good. Meanwhile, Kurt, himself the subject of one of Bill's unsuccessful transplant experiments, with his badly deformed left hand being the result, warns that another, a hideous creature that's kept locked behind a door in the lab, is growing violent and almost broke out the night before. Bill, however, decides to concentrate on Jan, and searches everywhere he can for a potential new body for her. Unbeknownst to him, Jan now despises him for what he's done to her, and the special serum that's keeping her alive for the time being is giving her telepathic powers, allowing her to communicate with the creature, and they are planning a combined revenge against him.

As you may expect, this low-rent movie was the work of some equally low-rent people, specifically Rex Carlton and Joseph Green, its respective producer and director, who also wrote the screenplay together. The thing is, though, I have very little to say about either of them (that newspaper clipping about Carlton was the only image I could find of either one). Carlton, whose career began at the end of the 40's, was a producer and occasional writer on a number of movies that I've never heard of, such as 'C'-Man, Guilty Bystander, Mister Universe, Josette from New Orleans, The Devil's Hand, and Blood of Dracula's Castle. As much as I may love old horror flicks and, at the very least, know of a number of very obscure films, I'd never heard of those latter two, nor stuff like Nightmare in Wax and such (not surprisingly, none of those movies have very high IMDB scores; not that you would expect them to). Unlike Green, who lived to be 71 when he died in 1999, Carlton only made it to 53, as he committed suicide in 1968 when he failed to pay back the mob for some money he borrowed in order to get a movie made. In fact, he was involved with so many movies around that time that they continued to be released two years after his death. As for Green, I have even less to say about him, as he only directed one other movie after The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and that wasn't until 1986. In fact, he has very few other credits after this flick on his IMDB page, and is said to have later ran a small, self-titled company that distributed various foreign films.

With our lead character of Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers), we have yet another extremely ambitious scientist who feels that science must move forward, no matter what the conservative establishment, including his own father, have to say about it. At the beginning of the movie, he does prove that he can get results with his unorthodox methods when he manages to successfully resuscitate a man whom his father had failed to save, but his father still doesn't approve of them. And recently, he's been trying to perfect a method of transplanting entire limbs and organs where the body will readily accept the new parts, using limbs from amputee operations in his experiments up at his family's secluded country house. He admits he's made "a few mistakes," namely his assistant, Kurt's, diseased and mangled left hand, and the hideous creature he keeps locked behind a door in the lab, but insists he's learned from them. But just when it seems as though Bill is going to get away from his experiments for at least a weekend in order to spend time with his fiancee, Jan, Kurt calls him up to the house, saying it's urgent. With no other choice, Bill drives up to there with Jan, but decides to go like a maniac, despite how curvy and twisting the road is. This leads to him crashing through a guardrail, with the collision throwing him clear of the wreckage but decapitating Jan. Once he realizes what's happened, he scoops up Jan's head and literally runs to the house, heading immediately down into the laboratory. There, he uses a special serum he's concocted, as well as an elaborate apparatus, to revive Jan's head and keep her conscious. Now, knowing he can only keep this up for no longer than a couple of days, he intends to put his transplant methods to the ultimate test and graft her head on to another body. Despite Kurt warning him that this is wholly unnatural and could lead to something horrific, as well as Jan begging him to let her die, Bill is determined to go through with it and spends the rest of the movie searching for a potential victim. This proves to be more difficult than he thought, though, as his first two tries are foiled when a potential eyewitness gets involved each time. In the end, he opts to lure in an old girlfriend, who also happens to be a model.

While the notion that he plans to murder an innocent person for their body, including an old acquaintance he comes across on the street, is bad enough, the way Bill tricks and lures in his former girlfriend, Doris Powell, is really despicable, given that she has issues with men after one assaulted her and badly scarred the side of her face. He uses that to entice her, saying that he and his father can use new advances in plastic surgery to remove the scar. He also tells her not to lose her trust in people as a whole in order to lure her into a false sense of security, and then invites her over

to the country house under the pretense that his father will then decide whether or not the surgery would be effective. With her hopes now up, she goes with him, and comes very close to literally losing her head. And though he claims he's doing all of this because he loves Jan, it's clear that Bill also sees this as the best opportunity to prove that his experimental transplants can work. Shortly after managing to revive her head, he tells Kurt that he feels he was fated to save her in this manner, that all of the skills in surgery and science he's learned over the years were meant for

this task. At the end of the movie, when he's finally got Doris down in the lab, Jan makes it clear that this isn't what she wants but Bill dismisses her, saying, "Is it a crime to want to keep you alive? Is it a crime for science to jump ahead by years? This kind of thing must be done." And when he's just about to begin the procedure, Jan exclaims, "You must be stopped! You must!", only for Bill to arrogantly respond, "And who's going to do it?", then put tape over her mouth to keep her from talking. Also, not only is this about Bill's ego, but when Jan first protests about this, he

tells her, "I want you as a complete woman, not part of one." Not exactly the most pure kind of love on his part now, is it? It doesn't matter, though, as Jan, despite her voice being silenced, uses her newfound telepathic connection with the creature in the room to have him kill Bill, while the laboratory goes up in flames.

Even though she's the most well-known piece of iconography from this film, Jan (Virginia Leith) is a potentially interesting character who, in the end, doesn't get to do much of anything. At the beginning, she absolutely adores Bill, is extremely proud of him when he manages to save the patient's life, and is eager to get married as soon as possible. She seems to be completely unaware of what her fiance has been experimenting on, and when he decides to take her up to the family country house, she's on the verge of learning. But, she ends up learning in the worst way possible, when Bill crashes the car and she's decapitated, only for her head to be revived in the house's basement laboratory. In terrible pain and having horrible memories of the crash, Jan begs for death, while Bill is out trying to find her a new body. Unbeknownst to him, the special serum that he used to revive her has also given her telepathic powers that allow her to sense what he's up to, as well as communicate with the creature he keeps locked up behind the door in the lab. She begins plotting with the creature to exact revenge on Bill, whom she now completely despises for what he's done to both of them, as well as for how horrendous his work is in general. She also begins to match wits with Kurt, learning from him that the creature is a mass of grafted limbs and tissues that Bill brought to life with an earlier form of the serum, as well as that Kurt himself had an arm grafted onto him after his natural one was amputated following an accident. And when she learns that Bill plans to put her head on another body, she exclaims that the foreign tissues would be rejected in the same manner that Kurt's body rejected his new arm. More than anything else, Jan begins to revel in the power she feels coursing through her brain, and demonstrates her influence over the creature in order to show Kurt that she's not as helpless as he thinks she is. As the movie goes on, Jan tries to get the creature to burst out of his cell, and goads him into killing Kurt when the chance arises. And during the climax, she gets the creature to burst out of the cell, and kill Bill, while Jan herself finally gets the death she's been hoping for.

I know you can't do much when you're just a head in a dish of liquid, but Jan, despite her claims of power and control, as well as her desire for revenge, doesn't get to do anything other than sit around and talk and talk and talk in various scenes, usually with either Kurt or the monster behind the door. It is interesting to see her match wits with Kurt, exploiting his obvious fear of what's behind the door, and she is, in the end, able to use the monster to her advantage, but she isn't nearly as entertaining of a character as I expected her to be. Also, numerous sources say that

Virginia Leith herself wasn't at all enthralled with her role or the movie, to put it mildly (can't really blame her, as that couldn't have been a comfortable position to stay in for God knows how long). In fact, she refused to return for any post-production work, forcing the filmmakers to use someone else whenever they had to do ADR, even for the driving scene leading up to the accident (it's very obvious, as the voice doesn't match Leith's at all, and is actually that of someone who appeared earlier as another nurse).

Though he initially believes that Bill's transplant plan for Jan is too unnatural, and is also himself an experiment that hasn't turn out so well, Kurt (Leslie Daniel) feels he has no choice but to stay with Bill and assist him. The reason for this is because he believes there's no place for him in the outside world with his deformed hand, and because he can't continue his own surgical practice until Bill is able to repair it. Even though he's gone through numerous failed transplants, when Kurt first speaks with Jan, he insists that Bill has learned from his mistakes and is confident that his new serum may be the key to a successful one, since it's been able to restore her to life. His relationship with Jan, however, becomes increasingly antagonistic when she begins boasting about the power the serum has given her, as well as how she and the monster are plotting to get revenge on Bill. Even though he sees this power for himself when she manages to communicate with the monster while he's down in the lab with her, he doesn't try to warn Bill of it, save for a vague allusion to something being "beyond control in that room!" And when Kurt later comes down to feed the monster, he and Jan get into a heated argument, with Jan accusing him of being afraid of the monster, despite his claims to the contrary (I got to say, even though their first conversation got kind of tense near the end, especially when Kurt saw what she was capable of, he comes across as overly antagonistic here from the beginning). Ultimately, when he least expects it, Jan has the monster grab Kurt and rip his right arm off, from which he slowly bleeds to death.

Bill's father (Bruce Brighton) appears only in the very first scene and is very much the classic authority figure who advises against his son's radical experiments and theories, even when they prove beneficial. While Dr. Cortner is proud that his son was able to save the life of the man he himself couldn't, he still doesn't approve of his methods, saying that he shouldn't experiment on people right there in the operating room. He especially doesn't agree with his theory about organ and limb transplants, and while he's aware that Bill is using the severed limbs from amputations in his experiments, he warns him that the hospital superintendent is beginning to suspect him. Ultimately, he heads off to a medical convention in Denver for the weekend, completely unaware of the horrible mess his son causes and the steps he takes to try to correct it.

Of the many women whom Bill considers for Jan's new body, the one he ultimately chooses is Doris Powell (Adele Lamont), who happens to be an old girlfriend of his from school (they never make it clear whether they're talking about high school or college), as well as a model. Having been attacked and badly scarred on her left cheek by a man years ago, she now has hatred for men in general and doesn't trust anybody. Thus, when Bill first shows up at her home following a photo session, she has no intention of going anywhere with him or anyone else. But when she shows him the scar, which she keeps hidden behind a lock of her hair, Bill slowly begins to reel her in by promising her that he and his father can fix it with new advances in plastic surgery. He manages to convince her to come over to his country house for a "consultation," and also ensures that nobody will come looking for her. When they arrive there, Bill gives Doris a drink laced with a drug that very quickly knocks her unconscious (she does realize what he did right before she collapses). But, before he can perform the operation, Jan uses her influence over the monster to have him break out of his containment and, after killing Bill, he carries Doris off to safety.

When Bill first goes looking for a body, he heads to this small strip club and catches the eye of a blonde stripper (Bonnie Sharie), whom he follows back into her dressing room. Talking in a voice that's kind of similar to Mae West, she makes her intentions very clear, and also considers herself the queen of the place. He's about to seal the deal, but just when they start kissing, a brunette stripper (Paula Maurice), one who made eyes at Bill out on the show floor, comes into the room. Though she claims she's only back there to change her clothes, she begins hitting on Bill, much to the blonde's irritation. The blonde tries to throw her out, the two of them get into an argument, and Bill, realizing that this isn't going to work out due to there being an eyewitness, opts to leave. The blonde tries to make him stay, promising to make it up to him later, but when the brunette says she'll remember him if he comes back, that reinforces his decision to leave. This leads to a fight between the two women, who'd already been trading barbs, with the brunette earlier telling the blonde to, "Keep your G-string on," and the blonde saying, "It kills her to see me make time," to which the brunette retorts, "You're the only thing that's going to be made around here tonight, honey." After Bill leaves, the two women have this heated exchange: "You lousy tramp. Once in a blue moon, I latch onto a guy with class and you mess it up!" "Eh! What makes you think you had him? He wouldn't have you on a bet." "Says who?" "Says me. What's a guy like that want with leftovers for?" "Leftovers?!" That leads to the brunette getting a slap to the face, to which she retorts by calling the blonde a, "Cheap, third grade stripper!", and they really start fighting, with the brunette yelling, "I'll mash you on the butt!" It's cheap and sleazy, but it's one of the more entertaining parts of the movie.

Up until the climax, the monster (Eddie Carmel) behind the door in the laboratory is only alluded to, as he can be heard growling and grunting in there when Bill first looks through the latch, and according to Kurt, he almost managed to smash his way out of the room the night before. Throughout the movie, Jan begins communicating with the creature with her newfound telepathic powers, getting him to respond to her by pounding and knocking against the door. He proves intelligent enough to tell her through his knocking that she's far from the first hideous result of Bill's experimenting, and that he knows what it's like to be such a failure. The two of them begin conspiring to get their revenge on him for what he's done, with Jan egging the monster on, trying to get him to break down the door, and also getting him to kill Kurt at one point. During the climax, he finally breaks out and we see that he's a hideously mutated, humanoid mass of grafted tissue and organs, brought to life by an early version of the serum Bill used to revive Jan. After killing Bill by biting a bloody chunk out of his cheek (which is so grisly that even Jan screams at that), the monster picks up the still unconscious Doris and carries her off to safety of his own volition, while the laboratory burns behind him.

If you can find a high-definition print of it (namely my source, which is Scream Factory's Blu-Ray release), The Brain That Wouldn't Die can come off as a fairly good-looking, mostly competently-made flick, with Joseph Green appearing to have a fair grasp of how to shoot things. I especially like how, during the opening surgery scene, they nicely suggest all you need to see of Dr. Cortner opening the man's chest and massaging his heart, while Bill works on the brain's motor area. Also, when Bill runs back to his car following the crash, the shot of Jan's hand extending out from below the frame, with fire all

around it, manages to be subtly gruesome when you realize she's been decapitated and what you're seeing is reflexive motor functions. And I won't lie, the way they hide the monster behind the door, only alluding to his presence with sounds, his banging against the inside, Bill's expression when he looks through the latch early on, and the monster's hand reaching out and killing Kurt, did make me curious as to what he actually looked like. However, there are other moments where the direction and editing come off as awkward. For instance, during the fateful drive up to the country house, they use some very overbearing

music, the sound of screeching tires, and a montage of random images, like close-ups of Bill's foot on the gas pedal, signs warning of curves up ahead, and traveling shots of the environment, both from inside the car and along its sides, to get across that he's driving really fast, even though it doesn't really look like he's going much faster than he was just seconds before. The actual crash is only alluded to, with a series of shots of the word "STOP" on the road, a sign that says "CURVE," a shaky POV from the car's front, a close-up of Bill with a frightened expression

on his face (it looks like he's yawning in that screenshot, doesn't it?), the aforementioned POV going into the guardrail, and various angles of Bill tumbling down a hillside. That's followed by a prolonged shot of Bill as he grabs at his side, before he sees the wreck and rushes to Jan's aid, with our only glimpse of the burning car being that shot where he takes away Jan's head. Obviously, they had to skirt around limitations in budget and equipment, but this comes off as more than a little amateurish.

The film also has a tendency to cut to awkwardly brief reaction shots of Bill's face, like when the brunette stripper comes in and ruins his chance to get the blonde, or when he's sitting in on Doris' photo shoot. Going back to that scene at the strip club, when Bill is first flirting with the blonde out front, it cuts back to the lab, for a shot that starts on Jan's head, then pans up the apparatus and over to a machine that's measuring her brainwaves, only to then cut back to the strip club. It does it again when he's in the dressing room with her, this time with Jan saying her often repeated line of, "Let me die." I think the movie

is trying to give you the first hints of Jan's newfound telepathy and that she's able to sense what Bill is doing, but it doesn't quite come across. Also, when the blonde slaps the brunette and the latter yells at her, the dubbing of her line doesn't match the actor's lip movements or action at all. But the weirdest bit of editing in the movie, by far, happens at the end of this scene, during their fight: it suddenly cuts to a piece of tapestry on the wall that has cats on it, and you hear a random voice go, "Meow." It's meant to signify that they're having a cat fight, but that was so unexpected and random that I didn't get the joke until someone

else mentioned it, as my brain was just dumbfounded. And there are some scenes that just feel like overly long padding, like the extended sequence of Kurt watching as Bill first revives Jan's head, the blonde stripper doing her thing when Bill first walks in, and, near the end of the movie, when Kurt, after getting his arm ripped off, staggers upstairs, tries to go out the front door but can't, then stumbles over to a chair, collapses into it for a few seconds, and finally stumbles back down into the lab, succumbs to the massive blood loss, and slumps down against the wall

(I might add that he does all of this action very melodramatically), with interspersed cutaways to Jan laughing and then watching him. Bill bringing Doris home, then going down into the lab and finding Kurt dead, covering up his body, then making Doris a drugged drink and taking it up to her, is also maybe a tad drawn out. And finally, when the movie ends, some prints have a final card where the title reads The Head That Wouldn't Die, one of several alternate shooting titles before they settled on the final one. Apparently, they either didn't think or just didn't care to try to change that little detail.

The movie was shot for a very small budget of around $62,000, and it looks it when it comes to the sets, which I've read were all built in the basement of a hotel in New York. While the operating room in the opening serves its purpose well enough, it's a prelude to just how bare the sets are going to be, especially Bill's laboratory at his country house, which is a fairly small room, with a table in the middle housing the apparatus and the liquid used to keep Jan's head alive, another table with chemistry equipment up against a wall to the left that has anatomy drawings on it, shelves full of chemicals next to that, along with an

operating table and a door in the back corner where the monster is kept. Speaking of the country house, the lavish exterior of which is Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York, the only other part of it that we see is the immediate interior beyond the front door, which just has a table with a plaster head atop it and, in the back, a stairway leading to the second floor. The strip club's exterior is a little spot next to some stairs that has a door and some cardboard cutouts of the women, while the interiors are a small bar and booth area where the blonde does her dance, and the

dressing room with that wall tapestry decorated with cats, a covered couch, and a vanity mirror. The swimsuit model contest that Bill goes to after the strip club doesn't work out takes place in is this very threadbare auditorium with just a small stage, fake stone columns on either side of it, and a black drape in the background, while the spot where we see Bill sitting with the two women accompanying him, after they enter in the wide establishing shot, doesn't even look like it's in the same building, given the wallpaper behind it (it might not have been, for all we know). And like the operating room, Doris' home studio, while serviceable, is nothing to write home about. That said, the woods that Bill and Jan drive through before the crash, which were likely in New Jersey, do look quite lovely.

Like I said in the introduction, the biggest reason why I'm not into this film is that it's just not that fun to watch, despite the premise, as well as what the clips and images you've likely seen from it may have you think. Again, once everything has been set up, the rest of the film consists of little more than a lot of extended scenes of Jan's head talking to either the monster in the closet or Kurt, as well as Bill repeatedly trying and failing to get a new body for her. Granted, there is some humor in how Bill's efforts are continually thwarted, first thanks to the cat fight between the strippers, and then when he manages to

convince an old friend of his to get in the car with him, only for a friend of hers to join them at the very last second and again create the problem of a potential eyewitness. But the scenes of him in the strip club, watching the swimsuit model contest, and his conversation with Doris, not to mention Kurt's prolonged death after his arm is torn out and Bill finding his body shortly afterward, are, like I said, so drawn out that it feels like they were compensating for what they knew was a very bare bones script. And yet, the climax, on the other hand, is too rushed and

anticlimactic: Bill prepares to perform the procedure with Doris, Jan has the monster burst through the door and attack him, a fire suddenly starts (I think it's due to the monster swiping a beaker of volatile chemicals off a table and onto the floor, but him doing so is shot and cut in a manner that makes it hard to tell, and it suddenly cuts to the chemicals combusting into flames), the monster kills Bill, and randomly picks up and carries away the unconscious Doris, while Jan relishes finally getting the death that she's wanted from the beginning.

While it was shot and completed in 1959, the film wasn't released until three years later and, according to Ben Mankiewicz during a showing of it on Turner Classic Movies, the reasons for that were both legal and censorship problems. Sure enough, there are two different versions: a 71-minute version that some sources say was the theatrical one, and an uncut 82-minute version, which is the one you get on the Blu-Ray. What's shocking is how violent and gruesome this longer version is, especially when you know when it was actually filmed, with a shot of the patient's exposed brain during the opening surgery

scene (that's in the shorter cut as well); Kurt getting his arm ripped off and running about the house, bleeding all over the place, before finally dying back down in the lab (that shocked me when I saw that clip on Whose Line); and the monster taking a huge bite out of Bill and spitting that chunk of flesh onto the floor. There are also some unsettling instances of makeup work, like Kurt's twisted, shriveled hand, the scar on Doris' cheek that she keeps hidden behind her hair, and the truly grotesque look of the monster, whose face is a nasty mass of tissue, with the right

eye much higher up than is normal, and a pointed, cone-like head, as well as his own gnarled hands. I'm sure that the movie's overt sleaziness may have caused problems as well, as the scene with the strippers in the dressing room is completely removed from the shorter version (it makes it come off like the blonde stripper's performance out front simply didn't impress Bill and he just gave up and went home), although the entire beauty pageant and Doris' posing session are left intact. And speaking of the latter, one of the extras on the Blu-Ray is an alternate version for the foreign markets where she's completely topless.

A lot of times when I talk about these sort of low-rent B-movies, and it's certainly been true of the lineup we've had for this month so far, I often find the music score to, at best, serve its purpose and fit the scenes, but be very bland or generic overall; that's something I definitely can't say about The Brain That Wouldn't Die. For better or worse, you're not likely to forget this music, which, because of the low budget, is all licensed stock music. Only the opening credits theme, titled "The Web," is given any authorship, as it's a piece by Abe Baker and Tony Restaino that was released by Laurel Records. Regardless, it's an effective note to start on, made up of creeping, unsettling strings, with a big flourish near the beginning. The opening operating scene is also scored in a similarly subtle, unsettling manner, a theme that's repeated during Jan's first time communicating with the monster in the closet. But Bill and Jan's drive to the country house is scored with this very loud, fast-paced, jazzy theme, which, as I said, also does most of the heavy-lifting in getting across that Bill is going faster than he should be. The music that plays following the accident, when Bill sees the wreckage and runs back to grab Jan's severed head, is scored in a sort of wistful manner that doesn't fit the scene, while his flight to the country house with the head is done with a very rhythmic theme that's... "better," but not by much. There are more low-key themes, like what you hear when Bill first connects Jan's head to the apparatus, only to end on a blaring horn when her head is first revealed, and the climax, naturally, is scored with some very bombastic music. But the parts of the score that stick in my mind the most are these very sultry themes that you first hear when Bill goes to the strip club. When he first arrives and watches the blonde do her dance, you hear this music that's accompanied by occasional vocalizing and male voices continually saying something like, "Chicky,"; you hear this during other sultry scenes throughout the movie (as well as when Bill stalks some women on the street and drugs Doris near the end, which makes thing even more skin-crawling), albeit without the voices. Another, similar theme is heard immediately afterward, when Bill hangs around in the bar area and then follows the blonde into the dressing room, and it's also heard in other scenes like the beauty pageant. That's the one that really tends to get stuck in my head.

Like with some of the other films I've talked about so far this month, I know there are number of people who have an affinity for The Brain That Wouldn't Die because, due to its public domain status, they saw it a lot when they were younger. But, because I'm not one of them, I have to be honest and admit that it didn't do much for me. While its premise and images will ensure that people will always at least know of it, and it is shockingly violent and sultry for its time, with some well-done makeup and a memorable music score, on the whole, it's a rather standard mad scientist movie with some uninspired characters, a central figure who doesn't get to live up to her full potential, very low production values, moments of awkward direction and editing, and, once Jan is in the pan, it's mostly very talky, drawn out, and not all that entertaining to me. There are some moments that did make me laugh, particularly that stripper cat fight, and there are instances of direction that I did like, but regardless, this is another one that I don't see myself watching ever again.