One popular subgenre of horror films are the "brain" films that usually are quite "brainless" in nature.   There's no better example of this than...

By Shane Burridge

Brain movies.  Let's stop and think about this for a minute.

Can you name many films that featured a brain or brain-like creature between 1955-1965 that wasn't a horror movie?  Not easy, is it?  And yet why did the brain--human or otherwise--become the "boogey-organ" it was made out to be in so many bad films of that time?  Look at the facts: taken by itself, the brain is nothing more than a soft mass of nerve cells and fibers;  when it's working properly it is the only organ capable of understanding itself;  it is unable to feel pain, even though it is the pain- recognition center for the rest of the body.  Most significantly, when it is properly resident in a host body it is capable of negotiating an inner universe of logic, ethics, emotions, and aesthetics.  Yet once it is removed from that body - well then, anyone can tell you that it just becomes plain evil!

Ipso facto, disembodied brains are monsters.  And it doesn't matter if their previous owners were philanthropic scientists or clean-cut academics.  Put 'em in a fish tank and straight away they turn bad.  Maybe it's because they have too much time on the hands that they no longer have.  Maybe all that thinking is just plumb bad for a lonely brain.  Maybe Hollywood's love affair with the Bad Brain was the next logical extension from the Atomic Mutant.  I mean, it's obvious: cut out the middleman!  Why go for the hoary old walking-mutant bomb metaphor when you can internalize it to the very faculty that was responsible for the whole mess in the first place. 

Psychology, psychiatry, past lives, mind control, brainwashing, ESP…these were buzzwords for the 50s' own special brand of post-nuclear fear, and since 80% or so of the human brain is an uncharted mystery, it seemed that here lay some potential for a new type of screen monster.  Case in point:  Donovan's Brain (where the brain wobbles about whenever it gets agitated);  Fiend Without A Face (where the brains still have those cute little spinal cords attached like tails).  The Brain From Planet Arous (complete with eyeballs, yet).  This is naturally scary stuff.  Consider, for example, the alternative The Liver From Planet Arous.   Does this work?  No.  I rest my case.  Remember the mutant from Metaluna in This Island, Earth?  Just one big ugly brain on legs.  And all of these films are scientifically accurate, since 80% of the brain is an uncharted mystery. 

This is where the irony, in case you haven't already noticed, kicks in. Brains are smart.   Movies about brains are not.  Star player aside, they are in fact quite brainless.  Maybe it's because 80% of film producers are an uncharted mystery.   Maybe, because brains were pretty cheap monsters to come up with, the rest of the movie would naturally follow suit.  For a case study let's look at one bad brain movie and see how it could be…well, less bad, for one thing.  I can't promise it could ever be good. 

I don't think there's any need to go much further than the 1963 (release date) opus The Brain That Wouldn't Die.  Brought to us by "The Brain That Couldn't Direct."  Not to mention "The Cast That Couldn't Act."  I admit to a special fondness for this film, for it was the first genuine "bad movie" that I ever saw.  As a naïve youngster I was unaware of film-making of this caliber, so the experience understandably left an impression on me.  Not even a couple of years of TV's Lost In Space had prepared me for something that was so obviously poor in execution and intelligence that it was a mystery how the adults responsible could ever have allowed it to happen.   For those of you uninitiated with this Z-grade classic, a synopsis follows.

After an offscreen car crash, neurosurgeon-cum-mad scientist Dr. Cortner (Jason Evers) somewhat casually relieves his girlfriend of her head and keeps it alive in his basement laboratory (the kind of setup that you already know is going to go up in flames during the picture's climax).  Arguing with her that "I want you as a complete woman, not part of one"-- did I mention that the head always has to have the last word?--he roams the town in search of the "right" body for his love (played by Virginia Leith, a discovery of Stanley Kubrick's).  As his search concentrates primarily on seedy nightclubs, beauty contests, and sleazy photography classes, it's not hard to gauge just what "right" means in this doctor's book.   Meanwhile Leith, who is being kept alive with a tray, a bathing cap, and a couple of electrodes, decides to quit while she's a head.  The doc, however, refuses to pull the plug on her because this would mean a twenty-five minute movie.  The head decides to kick ass.  Collaborating with the archetypal Beast in the Cellar, which has been located conveniently adjacent to her tray, Leith rebels against the doc, his assistant, and all male-chauvinist-pig mad scientists everywhere.  The Beast goes berserk.   Everyone dies.  The head gets the last laugh. 

Not surprisingly, The Brain That Wouldn't Die is one of Mystery Science Theater 3000's targets for spoofing.  As is usually the case, their own absurd dialogue doesn't get much worse than the original's (for example, the moment when Dr. Cortner takes over another surgeon's patient, peels back his scalp, cuts open his skull, and plugs wires into his brain, assuaging any worries the surgical team might have by telling them "I've been working on something like this for weeks"!).  I confess to having never seen the MST3K version, mainly because I don't see how they could "improve" on it.

As writer and director, Joseph Green must take most of the responsibility for this dud.   His static direction (he has no idea how to stage extras or action), the boring, empty sets, and the amateur cast (as Cortner's girlfriend, Leith is required to act only from the neck up, an instruction Green appears to have inadvertently given the rest of the cast as well) make most of Brain very dull.  The outright stupidity of the production is entertaining at first, but becomes tiresome until the closing sequences - it does pick up during Cortner's lab assistant's ridiculously protracted death scene (although this is cropped in some versions).  However, because the narrative is so nonsensical, it's easy to miss how tacky the film's agenda really is.  Women are objects--all that matters is how they look, whether they are burlesque dancers, models, or beauty contestants.  When two women get involved in a brawl Green has their room decorated with pictures of cats, and adds a meow at the end of the fight just in case we didn't pick up the joke. 

The most interesting themes of Brain are those that slip in between the lines--or between the frames - and are, I would suppose, largely unintentional on the part of the film-makers.  Watch the film as a child and it's just a stupid horror movie.   Watch it again as a teenager and it's misogynist trash.  Watch it again as an adult--although three viewings in one lifetime is not necessarily recommended--and you begin to see inconsistencies.  Surely Green didn't intend his film to have feminist elements, given the treatment of women in the first half of the story; yet the peculiar way the tables turn on the male characters suggests possibilities.  I don't subscribe that Brain has thematic weight, but it is worth noting the unconscious residue that is often permeated throughout this highly personal, uncontrolled, and unrefined genre of cinema.

Leith, for example, stands out as the only character that is totally independent--even while a disembodied head, she is in service to no one.  Without a body, she is no longer "beauty," but "brains"--it is only in this state that she stops being the doctor's obliging girlfriend and becomes his critic instead (he even has to gag her at one point).  To Green (and the doctor) body = object = control, which explains the change in the characters' relationship.  In other hands, these ideas might have been teased out to create a much more coherent and interesting film, but Green's cardboard characters and lazy, juvenile script pretty much put paid to that idea. 

And then there's Leith's telepathic relationship with the monster in the closet.  She bonds with this unseen creature in preference to her boyfriend because she can feel its pain (not that we've seen her in any evidence of physical pain - apart from that pesky decapitation problem--but it still raises the question: what does she do when her nose itches?).  Leith is only Brains, but the monster is all Beast.  It seems inevitable that it will become the physical expression of Leith's unfulfilled desires.  Are we talking id here or what?  The monster is, after all, generic to the point of being sexless.  Did Green ever really know why he threw an unseen creature into the basement in the first place?  Was it, on surface level, a concession to provide the audience with a monster of the standard-rampaging variety?  Or were subliminal forces in Green's own head being unconsciously manifest in this movie? Is the writer-director of this dumb film himself the "brain that wouldn't die"?

If you can stay awake long enough to find out, feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Contrary to the filmmakers' wish, the Brain did in fact die, along with all its slimy mutant kin.  As if it hadn't been depersonalized enough it was to become totally dehumanized in its future incarnation: the computer; not the humanoid robots of films past, but giant databanks that were pure thought;  brains stripped of all but logic, smarter than the little minds that had created them.  Roll on the next wave of movie monsters: even in the world of brains, size does matter.  Unfortunately, intelligence doesn't.

Food for thought, Shane...brain food, that is!  Perhaps this flick will resurface during the next few years as a "lost" feminist classic!  Then again...naw!  Cheers!

Article copyright Shane Burridge.

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