Brain That Wouldn’t Die

Year: 1962

Grade: B

Country: USA

Director: Green

Review

this is a classic. it’s sort of a 1960s precursor to “re-animator”…we follow an ambitious doctor who thinks he can bring people back from the dead (within a reasonable time) and can transplant body parts from dead bodies onto amputees. his girlfriend dies in a car crash on the first reel and he is able to salvage her head. he keeps her head alive while he searches for a body. it’s beyond me what joseph green didn’t make more than two pictures, because he clearly showed potential in his writing/direction on this film. the story alone is ripe with symbolic depth and secondary meanings. the protagonist goes out on the town searching for a woman with a perfect body just so that he can kill her, take her body and put his girlfriend’s head on it…it’s a shrink’s field day. at the very beginning the film addresses the philosophical/ethical ramifications of his “experiments” and that’s a level that most sci-fi films of the time don’t explicitly address. none of the performances are as awful as you might expect from a b-production. overall it’s an entertaining film that should be seen by anyone interested in the genre.