The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962)

We open in total darkness, from which emanates a disembodied female voice, begging for the sweet release of death. As to what that was all about? Well, we’ll have to wait for a bit as we cut from that ominous prologue to a brightly lit operating theater, where Dr. John Cortner is performing emergency brain surgery on a rapidly fading trauma victim. Alas, Dr. Cortner (Brighton) does everything he can except save the patient.

But after he calls time of death, Cortner’s intern steps in, saying he can revive the patient by implementing a new, untested procedure he’s been developing. Turns out this rather pushy intern is Dr. Cortner’s son, Dr. Bill Cortner (Evers). And after a brief Hippocratic debate that basically ends with the younger Cortner saying the patient was already dead, and how much more harm could they really do, the elder Cortner reluctantly yields the floor.

Here, as the father cracks open the patient’s chest and starts massaging the heart to keep the blood flowing as ordered, the son starts stimulating the exposed brain with electricity. And sure enough, the nurse is soon detecting a pulse. And after a few more harrowing minutes of Frankensteinian brain-zapping, the heart starts beating on its own, signaling the patient’s revival.

Now, even though the unorthodox surgery was a complete success, after the theater is cleared, the philosophical debate of “playing God” between the Cortners continues. A debate we soon discover they’ve had before. Numerous times by my ear. But to catch everybody else up:

Seems the younger Cortner feels they need to keep doing aggressive experiments like the medical miracle he just pulled off, saying they’re a key component to the development of his new serum, a “special compound,” that will allow human transplants of any type -- organs, limbs, you name it, without the usual fear of the host body rejecting these new parts. Thus, he shouldn’t be required to “play by the book” anymore and be allowed free rein to continue his experiments on other live human subjects. You know, for science.

But his father is aghast by this attitude and adamantly disagrees, stipulating there are rules and procedures for this kind of medical testing. He also knows how his son was most likely responsible for the recent rash of missing amputee limbs and misplaced organs at the hospital, which got “lost” on their way to disposal. And while the elder Cortner has done his best to cover up this fact, the hospital superintendent is starting to sniff around. He also fears what his offspring has been up to at the old family summer house; a house the father hasn’t been to since his wife died several years ago; but his son has spent an inordinate amount of time holed-up out there, in the basement, doing who knows what as he puts two and two together.

Surprisingly -- or maybe not, the younger Cortner doesn’t deny any of this. Yes, he’s been experimenting on his new serum in a lab he’s put together at the secluded manor. And yes, he’s the one that’s been stealing “material” from the hospital. And sure, he’s made a few mistakes along the way, but he’s learned from them. And he has every intention to keep on learning -- with or without anyone else’s permission.

This heated debate is then interrupted by a nurse (Brent), who informs father Cortner that all the traveling and hotel arrangements have been made for a conference in Denver he’ll be attending shortly (-- and never to be heard from again as far as the movie’s concerned). Also, she has a phone message for son Cortner; from somebody named Kurt, which says something “terrible” has happened at the lab and he needs to come to the house right away (-- he typed ominously.)

Then another nurse joins the conversation, Jan Compton (Leith), who turns out to be Bill Cortner’s fiance. And even though their wedding is just two weeks away, you get the sense these two have already, well, consummated things by the way they glom onto each other by the crotch and lips.

But! They do manage to pry themselves apart long enough to change out of their scrubs and hop into a convertible, which Cortner steers toward the palatial summer house out in the country to see what that cryptic phone message was all about. 

Alas, the driver was in too big of a hurry, blows through a curve at a high rate of speed and plows through a guardrail. But while Cortner was thrown clear, his fiance wasn’t as lucky.

And as he watches her body burn in the wreckage, a concussed and out of sorts Cortner retrieves something from the car and delicately wraps it up in his jacket -- something about the size of a musk melon.

What follows next is a mad dash to the house -- more of a mansion, really, where Cortner bursts in with his wrapped package tucked behind an elbow. He’s greeted by Kurt (La Penna), his lab assistant, who demands Cortner do something about whatever he’s got locked up in a closet downstairs in the lab -- until he realizes something else has gone terribly wrong.

Here, Cortner finally snaps out of his daze, saying they have to save her. Kurt doesn’t question who they must save, and just follows the other man into the basement lab. And here, after several shots of the men feverishly tinkering with wires and test tubes filled with strange fluids, along with implementing other scientific doodads and ephemera, if you haven’t guessed it already, we finally discover what Cortner retrieved from the car wreck: his fiance’s decapitated head!

Only now, Jan Compton’s noggin has been propped up and held in place by some makeshift scaffolding, like a macabre piece of surreal art: her neck stump embedded in a pan filled with a chemical soup of who knows what; with two large electrodes attached to her temples, stimulating her brain; and two massive tubes pumping blood and chemicals through what’s left of her body -- including the latest and improved batch of Cortner’s special “adrenal” serum. And as the two men watch, her eyes start to flutter. And then the head with no lungs starts to speak!

Thus, what once was dead now lives again. Sort of. And, Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow Programs, and Boils and Ghouls of all Ages, we haven’t even gotten to what’s lurking inside that closet yet...

Actress Cora Virginia Leith was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in October of 1925. Upon her graduation from Cleveland Heights High School, Leith’s family subsequently moved to Wyckoff, New Jersey, where her father, Oliver Leith, worked as the assistant president of the Radio and Television Institute.

Originally, Leith had the notion of being a writer and took a semester of journalism at Columbia University. But, “I flunked out,” Leith confessed to columnist Bob Thomas (The Herald-News, March 22, 1956). “I barely got through high school. I had one of the highest IQs in school, but got some of the lowest grades. I was always daydreaming.”

Leith then made a move to California. “I like warm weather,” she told Thomas. “But I didn’t like Florida. So I came here.” And after working as a hatcheck girl at a Beverly Hills restaurant, living off the leftovers and tips, Leith landed a job as a showgirl in Ken Murray’s Blackouts -- sort of a combination of vaudeville and a variety show. She stuck with the production for about a year as Leith also started finding work as a model.

This, in turn, led her back east -- New York City, to be precise, where Leith, now 18, shared a suite at the Spencer Arms on 69th Street in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with fellow model, Marilyn Hiller, who was only 17 at the time. It’s unclear how long the two shared the room, but a brewing animosity finally reached a head in the wee hours of the morning on October 23, 1943.

Now, contemporary news accounts of what exactly happened next are “slightly” contradictory. When the story first broke (New York Daily News, October 23, 1943), around 2:15am, Hiller couldn’t sleep and was trying to read in bed. Leith, who was also trying to sleep, objected to the light being on. Later accounts switched this, saying it was Leith who was trying to read and refused to turn a lamp off. Either way, things quickly escalated from there, as “someone slapped someone else and lacquered nails clawed at faces.” And then, according to Leith, Hiller got her hands on a razor blade, which she managed to wrest away and then retaliated, cutting the other girl across the arm and chest.

Hiller then fled the scene, bleeding profusely, and was taken to the hospital by friends, where she was patched back together to the tune of 40 stitches. The police were then called in and Leith was arrested, brought before a judge, and charged with felonious assault. Her father paid the $500 bail.

Later, during a grand jury hearing, a limping and bandaged-up Hiller gave her account of what happened, admitting she was the one who started the altercation, objecting to Leith leaving the light on. According to one newspaper report (The Patterson Morning Call, October 27, 1943), Hiller didn’t even want to press charges but was ordered to sign the complaint by Magistrate Morris Rothenberg.

And while Leith did not testify, Detective Frederick Sorger quoted the defendant’s initial statement, saying, Miss Hiller had thrown the offending lamp at Leith and she used the razor blade in self-defense. In the end, there was no indictment, Leith was free to go, and, apparently, the two former roommates left the courtroom arm and arm. Said Leith, “I’m not going to room with her any longer, but we’ll remain friends.”

Virginia Leith

This notorious incident did little to hamper Leith’s modeling career; in fact the notoriety probably enhanced it as she was soon appearing in advertisements for beer, bathing suits, and banks. And as the legend goes, when her smiling face appeared on Bank of America billboards all over California, Paramount Studios signed her to a contract and sent the model to acting school. But nothing really came of this and the studio dropped her contract when the option expired. But Leith’s big break was just around the corner, courtesy of a most unexpected source.

Before becoming one of the world’s most eccentric filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick had worked as a photographer for Look magazine. And it was in this capacity when he first met Leith during a cover shoot. And later, after scrounging up a $10,000 budget, he approached Leith about appearing in his inaugural feature, Fear and Desire (1953).

Stanley Kubrick (Sitting behind the camera).

Reluctant at first, being the only female in the small cast, Leith eventually signed on. She told Thomas, “I was afraid they were going up in the mountains to make some stag reels.” But Kubrick had something a little more highbrow in mind. 

And so, in this anti-war parable -- which Kubrick would later disown and try to wish out of existence by destroying every print he could find, calling it “a bumbling amateur film exercise” -- Leith played a “strange, half-animal” peasant girl, who was captured by four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, gets tied to a tree, and suffers through a lot of navel-gazing speeches before she’s assaulted and killed by a soldier gone off-his-nut played by Paul Mazursky.

And while not quite as bad as Kubrick made it out to be, the film does lay the existentialism on a little thick; so thick a viewer kinda wants to punch it in the proverbial face on several occasions. Leith, meanwhile, didn’t give it much thought after the film wrapped somewhere up in the San Gabriel Mountains and was soon headed off to another gig; a shoot somewhere in the Caribbean, involving bathing suits and five other models.

Thus, Leith was kind of surprised on her return to New York, where she saw the film was set to premiere at the avant garde Guild Theater, having been picked up by Joseph Burstyn, who specialized in distributing foreign-language films and smaller independent productions. And while Fear and Desire didn’t exactly light up the box-office, it did receive a fair shake critically.

Leith would later tell Bernard Agnelli (The Hackensack Record, December 3, 1954) how she “waited up until 3am to read the reviews in the early editions” and “put in a quick call to Teaneck to awaken her father with excited talk about what the critics called an ‘intense, realistic portrayal’ of the captive girl” -- who had not one bit of dialogue in the entire feature.

Then, in an effort to help promote the film, a four page spread appeared in LIFE magazine (May 11, 1953), which featured Leith prominently, including several risque photos taken by Kubrick himself. After which Leith was promptly offered a TV contract by NBC, and at least four movie studios came knocking, wanting to sign her. And after a grueling day-long screen test, Leith signed on with Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th Century Fox.

Her first features for Fox were a supporting role in Black Widow (1954), a murder mystery headlined by Ginger Rogers, Van Heflin, Gene Tierney and George Raft, and the western White Feather (1954), co-starring Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. She then played the “other woman” to Richard Egan and Margaret Hayes in the crime drama, Violent Saturday (1955).

In 1956, Leith started coming into her own, headlining with Guy Madison in the sudsy melodrama, On the Threshold of Space (1956), teamed up with Wagner and Hunter again in the psychological thriller, A Kiss Before Dying (1956), and played opposite William Holden in Toward the Unknown (1956). But just when her career seemed to be solidifying, the studio decided against renewing her contract in 1957.

According to Agnelli, the studio found her so average the publicity men could find no “angle” to play up -- no escapades, no spicy scandals (-- I’ll assume Zanuck buried the razor blade assault), no novelty to take the novelty capital of the world by storm. All they had was “a good -- and beautiful -- actress.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough.

Thus and so, Leith started kicking around on television -- The Millionaire (The Frank Hannigan Story, Season 5, Episode 13, 1958), One Step Beyond (The Bride Possessed, Season 1, Episode 1, 1959), taking whatever roles she could, which eventually led her back to New York, where she signed on with producer Rex Carlton for a strange little sci-fi pot-boiler, I Was a Teenage Brain Surgeon. Yup. From Kubrick (Fear and Desire), to Richard Fleischer (Violent Saturday), to Mervyn Leroy (Toward the Unknown), to Rex Carlton -- Nightmare in Wax (1969), Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969).

Now, according to Brian Albright (Filmfax #146, Nov-Jan, 2016), Carlton had been knocking around the film industry since the late 1940s. “More of a hustler and promoter,” observed Albright, “Carlton was a tall, natty dresser with angular features, whose chief talent seemed to be his ability to raise funds for quirky film projects that frequently slipped out of his control before they were distributed. But during his 30-year career in the movies, he managed to put his name on a handful of gritty, independent noirs, a classy British Sci-Fi sleeper, and one of the most ham-fisted horror films ever released,” which would co-star Leith.

But before we get to that, some of Carlton’s earliest efforts in showbiz was in the wild, no-holds barred world of professional wrestling in New York City around 1944, when he took over as head promoter for the St. Nicholas Arena -- an ice rink that doubled as a wrestling venue. Carlton would also serve as manager for wrestler Rimo Carnera, along with Jack Pfefer -- the Swedish Angel, Maurice Tillet -- the French Angel, and Martin Levy -- the Blimp.

“I had a flair for advertising, selling and exploitation,” said Carlton in a lengthy profile piece written by Marvin Kitman for Escapade magazine (August, 1960). “I had everything there -- wrestling girls, man vs. alligators, wrestling in mud, wrestling in a ring full of fish! But I got bored. The state Athletic Commission was always restraining me. They wouldn't even let me have girls wrestling or midgets. It wasn’t fun anymore.”

Carlton tried being a Broadway producer next in 1945, but his first attempt, Helles Belles, never even got off the ground; and his second, Open Houses, flopped big in ‘47 and shut down after only seven performances. “It was the only thing I ever lost money on in my life,” lied Carlton. And, “It taught me two things: critics can kill you in the theater as nowhere else, and never invest your own money.”

Thus, Carlton set himself up as a film producer next, teaming up with Joseph Lerner to form Laurel Films. Like a lot of others, Lerner had learned the nuts and bolts of filmmaking while serving in the Signal Corps during World War II, stationed at the Photographic Center in Astoria, New York. After he was discharged, Lerner directed his first feature, The Fight Never Ends (1947), which starred heavyweight champ Joe Louis, who tries to keep a gang of Harlem kids on the straight and narrow.

On their first co-feature, C-Man (1949), a crime thriller about a U.S. custom agent played by Dean Jagger, “Carlton and Lerner worked largely without access to studio facilities, leveraging crews that mainly came from the theater world or were shooting newsreels for local [New York] companies,” according to Albright.

And with the good reviews and decent box-office of The Fight Never Ends, the fledgling enterprise was able to secure financing for C-Man through the Chemical Bank and Trust Company of New York. However, the bank kinda dragged its feet on issuing the $60,000 loan. And with the start of production looming, Carlton worked his magic:

Hiring a model, Carlton instructed her to go to the bank manager’s office wearing nothing but a mink coat wrapped in a ribbon that read, “The Boat Leaves 3rd of January” -- which was the day the picture was supposed to start shooting. And as the story goes, the model did as instructed, flung the manager’s office door open, strutted in, and disrobed, dropping the mink to the floor. And as the story continues, Carlton kept sending her back to pull the same stunt, every day, for a week, until the loan finally came through.

Cinematographer Gerald Hirschfield got his start with Carlton and Lerner. And so, before he started shooting things like Fail Safe (1964) for Sidney Lumet, Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) for Frank Perry, and Young Frankenstein (1974) for Mel Brooks, Hirschfield was riding around on a precarious makeshift camera rig mounted on a rented Chevy convertible, prowling through the streets of New York, getting the shots Lerner wanted for C-Man. “They couldn’t even afford a soundstage,” said Hirschfield. “There was a sound recording studio on 44th Street, a big empty room, and they used that as their stage.”

Hirschfield stuck around for Laurel’s follow-up feature, Guilty Bystander (1950), a solid noir where a disgraced cop, lost to the bottle, makes his way through New York City’s seedy underbelly to rescue his kidnapped son. Here, the extra $400,000 in the budget certainly helped matters.

Now, Guilty Bystander was supposed to be followed up by a wrestling film, Mister Universe (1951), which was set to star Jack Carson and Janis Paige and featured the big screen debut of Vince Edwards. But during production, Film Classics, who had handled the distribution of the first two Laurel features, sold out to Eagle Lion, who backed out. United Artists also said no. And while Columbia did show some interest, they, too, backed out. And so, the film sat on a shelf for over 18 months, which caused a default on the production loan and the film was foreclosed on, which essentially bankrupted Laurel Films out of existence. And while Mister Universe was later picked up and released in 1953 by National Telefilm Associates, it was already too late.

Thus, Lerner and Carlton would work freelance next on Josette of New Orleans (1958), a vehicle for the burlesque dancer and stripper, Lili St. Cyr, for producer Irving Weisner. This was shot in 1953 but ran into so many production problems and hassles with the censors it wasn’t released until 1958. After that, Carlton and Lerner officially broke up.

Over the next five years Carlton kept regrouping and trying again, but failed to get the proposed features Seeds of Darkness or Kill Me Gently into production. But then, in January, 1959, with his new partner, Rick Newberry, and financing from Alvin Bubis, they took Jo Heim’s script for Naked Goddess and turned it into The Devil’s Hand (1961), a moody little thriller about a voodoo cult of demon worshipers.

Heims was a former studio secretary turned screenwriter, who wrote The Girl in Lover’s Lane (1960), and would go on to write the Elvis Presley vehicle Double Trouble (1967) and penned the original story idea for Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me (1971). And the film would be directed by William Hole -- fresh off The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959) for American International Pictures. But during production something went wrong, according to Bubis.

“I got rid of those guys,” Bubis said. “I loaned them money and the money disappeared. I had to go to court and kick them out.” Bubis then took over, finished the production, and sold it to the newly minted Crown International, who finally released The Devil’s Hand in 1961. And while Newberry still appears in the credits, Carlton’s name was expunged. 

Not long after, Hollywood gossip -- I’m sure instigated by Carlton, claimed he was about to start shooting something called Johnny Murder for 20th Century Fox. In truth, Carlton was again flat-busted and limping back to New York City. But he didn’t stay down for long, and soon found himself teaming up with yet another partner.

Joseph Green met Carlton through a mutual friend, Broadway producer Harry Blaney. Green had worked as a writer and director of TV commercials. “And, like everybody else, I was looking for my first shot as a director of a feature film,” said Green (Filmfax #18, January, 1990). And it was while sitting around in Carlton’s office when they decided to make a movie together. As to what it would be, Carlton seemed to pull a title out of the ether, the aforementioned I Was a Teenage Brain Surgeon -- an obvious and shameless grope at Herman Cohen’s highly successful I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Teenage Frankenstein (1957).

The two then kicked this notion around for two or three days while Green hammered out a script, changing the title to the less actionable but no less exploitable,The Head that Wouldn’t Die! -- later rechristened as The Brain that Wouldn’t Die! (1962) by the film’s eventual distributor, American International, perhaps in an effort to avoid any confusion with Universal International’s other dismembered head feature, The Thing that Couldn’t Die (1958). And then the brass at AIP made a half-assed effort to change the film’s title credits before releasing it with about the same amount of success as they did with The Spider / Earth vs. the Spider (1958).

But the film had to be made first before it could be distributed. And in July of 1959, Rex Carlton Productions officially began mailing out flyers to possible investors for a brand new horror film, asking for $1,000 in exchange for one-third of one percent participation in profits:

“Enclosed herewith is a brochure, budget, participation agreement, and a story synopsis, which I hope will not shock you. The public never tires of paying at the box office to see monsters chasing half-clad girls. The formula never fails.”

“Rex started to talk to the ‘Angels’ about money for the film,” recalled Green. “‘Angels’ are individual investors, and, in this case, our Angels were mostly people who had invested in Broadway plays.” Carlton assured these potential investors their money would be recouped within four months of general release, guaranteeing a 500% return via theatrical and TV distribution. And through these efforts, Carlton managed to bilk -- sorry, “raise” a budget of $62,000.

“I wrote this story about a young brain surgeon who does experiments on weekends at his country estate -- a doctor who’s going off his rocker and bringing decapitated heads back to life,” said Green. “Herb Evers played the surgeon. His fiancee, the ‘head’ was Virginia Leith, who had the toughest job -- and the one that proved the most difficult in terms of the production. It took a great deal of time for her to get in and out of that contraption we used for the head.”

And being stuck in that contraption indefinitely, brought back to life against her will, suffering through physical pain and psychological torment over the cumulative extent of her traumatic injuries and her ersatz resurrection as a head without a body (-- think of the ramifications of Phantom Limb Syndrome alone, especially with the last thing she remembers is being on fire), this would only be the tip of the iceberg of the dire ignominities Jan Compton would have to suffer through as Cortner hatches a plan to see this dubious experiment through to its logical conclusion -- logical to him anyway.

“What you see is real. What’s done is done, and what I’ve done is right,” says a triumphant Cortner to a disbelieving Kurt. “It’s the work of science.” His patient, however, would disagree. Again, all she can remember at first is the fire. And as she becomes more lucid and realizes what Cortner has done to what’s left of her, Jan begs them both to just let her die. (And to be fair, there is a hose that runs to the back of her neck, I assume from a ventilator of some kind, providing the forced oxygen she needs to make her vocal cords work.)

Despite these objections, which are kinda seconded by the strangely puritanical Kurt, with Phase One of his plan a success, Cortner starts to lay out Phase Two, which is grafting Jan’s head onto another body to make her complete and whole again. Of course to accomplish this, the donor will have to die. As to whether this is all for true love, hubris, or science? Well, that’s up for debate. But they don’t have much time as the mad doctor figures, under these dubious circumstances, he can keep Jan alive for about 48-hours total, giving him just two days to find a suitable replacement body.

But before he goes off searching, Kurt finally convinces Cortner to check on the dreaded mystery secreted in the closet; whose massive oaken door, large metal hasp, and sizable padlock is not a good sign, given that Kurt claims that whatever’s in there nearly broke out earlier this afternoon.

Here, as Cortner checks the lock and hinges, we hear some inhuman gibbering coming from inside. He then takes a peek through a reinforced hatch, is instantly repulsed by what he sees on the other side, and slams the cover shut. But do we get to see this monstrosity? Nope. At least not yet.

And I’m not sure if its arrogance, a concussion talking, or a cheap plot contrivance, but Cortner tells Kurt not to worry about the cops as he cleans up, feeling both the car and the body were completely destroyed by the fire, and therefore, they won’t be able to trace it to him -- at least not until after they’ve finish fixing Jan.

With that, Cortner heads out into the night to find a suitable new chassis for his fiance. And as a surprise to no one, this A-1 Creep starts this search at a strip-club (-- all for you, Honey!), where he’s lured back to a dressing room by a blonde stripper (Sharie) after the floor show, and then clumsily tries to seduce her by sticking his nose into her ample cleavage. (Seriously, Jan. All for you!) 

But before he can whisk her away, into the night, never to be heard from again, they're interrupted by a brunette stripper (Morris), who pithily says she staked a claim to Cortner first. And as this quickly devolves into an all-out, bitch-slapping cat-fight, not wanting any witnesses to his malfeasance, Cortner gawks at this display of claws and estrogen for a bit before slinking away to try his luck elsewhere.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, as she becomes more aware of her surroundings, Jan does her best to interrogate Kurt on the How, Why, and What: How is she still alive; Why would he ever go along with her fiance’s mad experiments; and What’s that being hidden in the closet?

Here, Kurt tries to explain Cortner’s breakthroughs in transplant surgeries, which led to Jan’s current predicament; and how his boss is now off looking for a donor body. Jan claims this will never work, and the tissues will reject each other. (Oh, no. Do NOT try to bring any ACTUAL medicinal science into this nonsense now! It’s already too late.) But Kurt assures Cortner has invented a workaround for this.

See, Kurt is very interested in this workaround, too. I’m sure by now we’ve all noticed how the assistant has a malformed hand and arm. He then confesses that he used to be a surgeon, too, until an accident robbed him of the use of his left hand. But when Cortner promised he could fix this by grafting a whole new arm onto his body, Kurt readily agreed to be a test subject. 

However, turns out his current condition was actually the fourth or fifth attempt at a transplant, which failed just like all the others. Still, Kurt holds out hope that Cortner will eventually get it right. Until then, he will patiently serve him -- and Jan is just another step in that process.

As for what’s secreted in the closet? Well, if you were wondering where all those limbs and organs Cortner stole from the hospital wound up, apparently, that’s the accumulation of all of the mad doctor’s earlier experiments. Says Kurt, “It’s the sum total of all of Dr. Cortner’s mistakes.” 

Yeah. Seems he grafted together a human jigsaw puzzle, shot it up with his magic elixir, and then sent several thousand jolts through it. And not only was the creature now alive, but it continued to mutate into something truly hideous -- a brainless beast with a desire to escape and destroy those that created him.

Here, Jan tunes into the fact that Kurt is absolutely terrified of this monster, and she uses this fear to mock him, a truly bitter scene, until he angrily leaves the lab, giving her some needed privacy. For at this point, Jan is also starting to realize that adrenal serum has had some unexpected side-effects -- namely some rudimentary telepathy, which not only allows her to keep a mental tab on Cortner while he bar-hops for replacement parts, but also allows her to communicate with the misshapen monster’s mind, creating some kind of symbiotic relationship. And the longer the serum courses through her brain, the stronger Jan’s new power grows. And so, together, they start plotting their revenge.

Now, having struck out the night before, Cortner is back on the prowl the next day, looking for the right combination of gams, breasts, and a perky behind -- this time eyeballing an old flame of his named Peggy Howard (Hanold -- whom sharp eyes will recognize as Princess Marcuzan from Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965). He’s even got her lured into his car for a trip to the old homestead and a beheading, when another woman, Donna Williams (Mason) spots them, derailing everything. 

This is not a total loss however, as it turns out both women were to serve as judges for some kind of swimsuit competition, which allows Cortner to gawk at a few more probable candidates for a good chunk of the afternoon.

But it's during this competition when Peggy clues Cortner in about an old classmate of theirs, Doris Powell, who’s apparently back in town, working as a semi-nude cheesecake model for any horny locals with a camera and the price of a session ticket. Of course Cortner remembers her. He beat up some hooligan who made fun of her after the girl suffered a terrible “accident” to her face.

And with this promising lead, Cortner tracks Doris (Lamont) down at her makeshift studio, where she’s just finishing up a session with several tongue-wagging photographers. (Again, sharp eyes will spot ex-Jerry Lewis impersonator Sammy Petrillo, of Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) infamy, as one of the shutterbugs.)

Once they clear off, Cortner and Doris get reacquainted, where she reminds this “Galahad” of her all-consuming hatred of men, which is spurred on by that accident -- that “accident” being her degenerate ex-boyfriend slicing her face open in a fit of rage, leaving a terrible, disfiguring scar on her left cheek. 

Kind of a sad story, really. Not helped by Cortner’s lecherous presence -- playing on her insecurities, his beady eyes measuring every nook and cranny. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t take the time to *ahem* “kick the tires” first before committing; in a biblical sense -- if you know what I mean, and as a wise man once said, I think you do.

Alas, for poor Doris, a more perfect and perfectly isolated victim Cortner could never find. And under the false pretext of meeting his father for some possible plastic surgery that could fix her face, his victim finally lets her guard down and agrees to accompany him back to the manor for a free “consultation” -- a fatal mistake, as Cortner clandestinely cleanses the scene of any trace that he was ever there while she changes clothes.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, Kurt defiantly returns with the Mutation’s evening meal -- all in an effort to prove to Jan that he isn’t afraid of it nor a fool for believing in Cortner. Here, she keeps on prodding and poking, until Kurt curses at her, wishing Cortner had also cut out her wicked tongue while turning her into a human Tinker-Toy. 

And poor Kurt doesn’t even realize he’s being distracted and goaded into a trap until it’s far too late, as a monstrous hand reaches out through the unlocked hatch, seizes his good arm, and then promptly tears it off at the shoulder socket!

Now, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to infer that along with the telepathy, Jan might’ve also gained some telekinesis, too, allowing her to undo the bolt on the hatch. (We don’t get to actually see this.) That, or she noticed Cortner carelessly left it undone when he peaked at the monster earlier. I could go back and double check, but, meh. *shrug* (Editors Note: While taking screen-caps, the guy who writes all of this nonsense finally noted that it was Kurt who unlatched the spider-hole cover, then forgot, distracted by Jan. All according to plan...)

Either way, left with a bloody stump where, ironically enough, his good arm used to be, Kurt collapses to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the door as he goes down. Unfortunately, this jarring blast of outright gruesomeness is kinda short-circuited a bit as Kurt miraculously recovers, and then, essentially, and quite comically, does a victory lap through the entire house as he bleeds out -- for nearly two whole minutes -- before finally returning to the lab, smearing more blood all over the walls as he goes, except for the main room upstairs, ‘natch, before he finally expires. (Wow. Would you like a little cheese with your ham, there, sir? Even Bugs Bunny didn’t take that long to croak.)

Meantime, Jan continues to mentally reach out to the Mutation, ordering it to continue bashing at the door. And the hinges are just starting to give way when Cortner and Doris arrive at the manor. Here, he leaves Doris upstairs while he heads down the lab, where he also keeps the booze because of … reasons. 

Anyhoo, he discovers Kurt’s corpse -- more potential scraps to experiment on, I’d wager. But until then, Cortner just covers the body, and then fixes a spiked drink for his victim, despite Jan’s protest to just give up on this madness.

But Cortner is determined to see this damnable experiment through to the bitter end, whether Jan appreciates this or not. And once Doris’ roofie goes into effect, she winds up strapped to a gurney in the lab, where Jan continues to chastise her fiance, which earns a strip of adhesive tape over her mouth. 

Unfortunately for Cortner, she doesn’t need her voice to send a psychic S.O.S. to the Mutation, who starts banging on the door again before the surgeon can make his first incision. Drawn to the door, Cortner is nearly crushed as the captive first grabs him out of the hatch and nearly pops his head like a pimple with only one hand!

The Mutation then finally manages to break the door down. (Hell, it knocks the whole door frame loose.) And when the hulking monstrosity finally emerges, we see the thing at long last: a hideous, pin-headed giant, its facial features distorted wildly, as if melting off!

For a moment, Cortner is saved by the discombobulated door itself, which serves as a shield when the Mutation gets hung up on it until tossing them both away. The creature then seizes Cortner, lifts him into the air with terrifying ease, and, great googily-moogily, bites a good-size chunk out of his creator's neck!

Cortner is then dropped to the floor, where he quickly bleeds out. But during their struggle, several racks of volatile chemicals were knocked over, which ignited and set the whole lab ablaze. And as everything burns, Jan manages to work the tape off, who then prompts the Mutation to get the innocent girl out of the burning lab to safety.

And once they're clear, she watches, satisfied, as the flames inch ever closer, knowing full well she is about to get her dying wish fulfilled -- the sweet embrace of oblivion, Cortner lying dead before her, and all of his collected works going up in flames with them (-- well, except for the Mutation). And as the hellish inferno rages and we fade to black, we hear Jan laughing triumphantly as the (mistitled) end credits roll.

It was while filming The Brain that Wouldn’t Die when Kitman interviewed Carlton for that Escapade piece. Thus, the reporter was allowed access to the set, which was still under construction between takes. Kitner would comment on how all the sawing and hammering would stop when the director called “Action!” And then resumed whenever they heard a “Cut!”

All the interior scenes were shot in the Lance Studio, which was located in the basement of the Henry Hudson Hotel on West 58th. “It was a small, compact studio,” said Green. “But it had very good acoustics and they did a lot of recordings there.” The rest of the film was shot on location, including the exteriors of the Detner Estate, a huge castle-like mansion that overlooked the Hudson River near Tarrytown, New York. The production had permission to shoot on the grounds and outside the house but weren’t allowed inside. Sadly, the property would later be gutted by a devastating fire in 1971.

And after 13 days of harried filming, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, by some miracle, was completed both on time and on budget. “I tried for a bleak mood right from the first scene,” said Green. “Later, if you have enough time, you can also create the desired atmosphere with lighting and editing. I hate to make it sound like a race, but that’s exactly what a low budget film is, a race against time. Economy forces you to be effective.”

Now, during the slapped and dashed production, an anonymous actor confessed to Kitner, “I don’t know where [Green] got his experience directing, but he didn’t even know where the viewfinder on the camera was the first day.” As mentioned, this was Green’s first feature and would also be his last until 27 years later, when he filmed The Perils of P.K. (1986), a tale of a Las Vegas stripper trying to make a movie. And that would be the extent of his directing resume.

Here, his inexperience as both a director and a screenwriter shows -- and kinda badly, as everything is a little too overwrought and scenes linger a little too long as the film can’t seem to find or maintain a constant speed. But to his credit, Green does manage to pull off a few interesting set-pieces. I especially liked the montage sequence leading up to the wreck, which we don’t actually get to see due to, I assume, budget limitations. And so, Green effectively shot around this with some clever editing. And that totally bonkers climax is one for the ages.

The lack of budget also purged several other lofty script ambitions. The first being a scene where the incapacitated Jan is menaced by a rat with no way to defend herself. “That was a scene I really wanted to do,” recalled Green. “A rat appears, scurries over the tables, and sees the blood circulating through the tubes to the head. It’s late at night and the head is alone. The rat sniffs the blood, drinks a little, and then really starts to go into a frenzy. It then starts toward the head, which has been watching the whole scene helplessly.”

Jan in the Pan (left), Joseph Green (right).

According to his Filmfax interview, Green actually tried to shoot this scene but ran into some mounting technical difficulties due to an uncooperative “star.” Said Green, “I could’ve made a hell of a scene out of that, but the rat simply wouldn’t take direction.” And so, after trying for over two hours to get the rat to cooperate, the director was forced to abort the scene and moved on.

As for other things that might’ve been left on the cutting room floor, when casting the potential victims, Carlton told Kitner that “he had picked out women for the film who would strip down for the European version, estimating the additional skin would add another $200,000 to European sales.” Rumors abound of an alternate cut of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, where the strippers bare all and Adele Lamont appears nude during her photo shoot for the “leering photographers.” But as far as I know both the European cut and these rumored alternate nude takes do not exist. There are two different versions of the photo scene, one where Lamont wears a swimsuit and another where she wears a sheer negligee. That’s it, as far as I know.

San Francisco Examiner, July 16, 1962.

Also, while grotesque enough as is, the film’s monster was originally intended to be even more outlandish and gruesome. According to Carlton by way of Kitman, “Our mutation has to have a big mouth because he bites off the doctor’s head in the last scene. It’ll be a great scene. You know what a chicken without a head looks like? The doctor is going to stagger around, tripping all over himself before falling down.”

But despite all of Carlton’s boasting and bravado this ghastly visual proved too much of a leap for the film’s budget. To also punch-up the climax, Carlton falsely claimed the last five minutes of the picture would be shot in Technicolor. “That’s the only time the monster will actually be shown on screen. People get used to ugliness if they see it too long -- whether in a girl or a mutation.” ... In a girl? Wow. I’m beginning to think Rex Carlton was kind of an asshole, but this explains the overall skeevy tone of this picture so much. Anyhoo, the color idea didn’t come to pass either.

Still, despite these budget limitations the crew still pulled off a few minor miracles. Sure, while Cortner’s lab was a tad sparse, art director Paul Fanning and special effects coordinator Byron Baer pulled off a major minor miracle with their “Jan in the Pan” display. I appreciate how it appears some thought went into it on a technical level, with the blood infusers, air hose, and electrodes. And with a few magician’s gimmicks and tricks, along with a prop head for the over the shoulder shots, and a strategically placed mirror, they were able to pull off a couple of gags to give the illusion of an actual severed head nestled on the table.

Mention of a positive nature should also be made for the film’s musical score. Most of it was canned muzak but it proved just as delightfully vile as the film itself. “It was all done by Ed Craig,” said Green. “He had been in the business for many years and he had a large library of stock music.” The only original piece was the sax-heavy “The Web,” written by Abe Baker and Tony Restaino, which had several encores, playing whenever Cortner was out on the prowl, oozing right along with him.

Kudos to makeup man George Fiala, too, for making something out of a whole lot of nothing. The grue effects for The Brain that Wouldn’t Die are quite startling -- especially given the time period, and strangely effective. And dare I say, probably worked better in Black and White. The exposed brain during the surgery, Kurt’s pulpy stump, with the accompanying viscera, which actor Anthony La Penna gleefully smears all over the walls during his extended death scene.

But this is all topped off by the graphic bite the Mutation takes out of Jason Evers’ neck, with the skin stretching and snapping, and then the monster pulls the offending “meat” out of its mouth, examines it, and then drops it to the floor with a satisfying splat, where the camera lingers on it just long enough. “It was actually a piece of liver,” said Green.

And while the monster makeup wasn’t the greatest creature ever created, it’s effective enough. Wearing that deformed visage was Eddie Carmel. Like Rondo Hatton -- House of Horrors (1946), The Brute Man (1946), Carmel suffered from acromegaly, a pituitary disorder that causes accelerated growth. At ten years old Carmel was already well over six-feet tall, and by the time he graduated high school he was over seven-feet.

Due to his abnormal size it was hard to find employment. Known as The Jewish Giant or The Happy Giant, Carmel would appear in Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus on West 42nd Street in Times Square. And later, he would join the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus as “The World’s Tallest Man."

I’m sure it was his size that got him the role as the Mutation in The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Carmel was a professional wrestler for a spell, too, where he most likely first came into contact with Carlton. “Eddie was very cooperative,” said Green. “Every actor should be that easy to work with. In fact, there weren’t any prima donnas in the cast. They all knew we had to move fast.”

And while Green had nothing but praise for Virginia Leith, calling her extremely cooperative under some very trying circumstances, the actress wasn’t that thrilled with the production nor her producer. And after filming wrapped, she reportedly refused to come back for some needed ADR work, resulting in some very poorly dubbed-over scenes by a different actress, Doris Brent, who played the other nurse. Yup. That’s not Leith talking during the car ride, nor is that her laughing during the climax. And once you tune into the different voices, you can’t not hear the difference.

As for her performance, I think Leith does the best she can given the physical limitations of the role and the shortcomings of Green’s script that appears less interested in her predicament and more interested in the “search” for her new body. Her eyes always tell a story, and I buy that her character is in constant pain. Also of note, Kitner reported that while a masseuse had been hired to make sure the actress was “as comfortable as possible as she sat for hours with her head poking out of a table top” she was more often than not tending to Carlton’s shoulders instead. Yup. Pretty much hate that guy.

Leith would basically retire from acting after appearing in this film, returning briefly in the late 1970s for a couple of television appearances -- Beretta (Guns and Brothers, Season 3, Episode 23, 1977), Starsky and Hutch (Death in Different Places, Season 3, Episode 5, 1977), and then officially called it a career after appearing in the Made for TV Movie, Condominium (1980).

As for the rest of the cast, Jason “Herb” Evers turns in a rock-solid performance as the slimy Dr. Cortner. Again, unsure if it's hubris or true love that motivates him, maybe a little of both, but Evers is fun to watch. Anthony La Penna, meanwhile, could’ve brought it down a couple of notches. Then again, how do you say dialogue like, “There is a horror beyond yours, and it’s in there, locked behind that door! Paths of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculation, and often lose themselves in error and darkness,” and not sound like a total twat?

Adele Lamont also stands out as the severely damaged Doris Powell. Alas, she kinda comes into the story late and doesn’t have much to do except get duped, get drugged, and nearly get her head lopped off. I will assume Cortner needed her still alive for the amputation for whatever reason, which gives us yet another reason to root against that guy. And while the ending is kind of ambiguous, I’m pretty sure both her character and the Mutation survived the fire. Sequel bait? Perhaps. But trust me, the original film had enough problems as is -- even after it was technically done.

“A lot of pictures are produced, and then, for one reason or another, they simply sit on the shelf,” said Green. Shot in 1959, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die would not be released until 1962. Apparently, Carlton had several distributors lined-up and interested but they all fell through. And after the film collected dust for nearly two years, he finally found a taker at American International.

Here, the distributor officially changed the name, chopped-out all the explicit gore, and went with the less saucy cut of the photo session -- about ten minutes all told were excised. And with a beautiful though slightly misleading poster campaign courtesy of the great Reynold Brown (-- sorry, no mono-optical brain in a jar here, move along), The Brain that Wouldn’t Die started rolling out in June of 1962, paired up with Bruno VeSota’s basically unwatchable anti-comedy, Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962).

Buffalo Evening News, June 1, 1962.

Meanwhile, as their film languished on the shelf, Carlton and Green split up -- only Carlton never bothered to tell Green. “I was supposed to make another film for Rex,” said Green. “A Caribbean adventure from a script we had found. But after a while, Rex decided to return to California and I began making commercials again. I thought I’d just wait in New York until he got back, but Rex, of course, didn’t come back.”

Between his two directing gigs in 1959 and ‘86, Green formed Joseph Green Pictures, a small, independent distribution company that specialized in “an eclectic mix of minor foreign films,” including Jess Franco’s Two Undercover Angels (1969) and Kiss Me Monster (1969), Luciano Ercoli’s Killer Cop (1975), and Claude Chabrol’s Pleasure Party (1975).

And after a two year hiatus in California, Carlton went to England, where he made a deal with Anglo-Amalgamated, which netted them The Unearthly Stranger (1963), a tale of psychic projection and alien invaders on the astral plane. He would then launch Paragon Films in 1965, announcing they would be making four horror films in the near future. But as this fizzled, he tried his hand again at producing a Broadway play, this one starring and bank-rolled by Jayne Mansfield. The Rabbit Habit opened in December, 1965, and then folded five days later.

In 1966, he relaunched Paragon Films, this time teaming up with Al Adamson and Sam Sherman, who were just starting out in the business, on a proposed adaptation of Feast of the Vampires -- a fairly gory sex comedy, according to those who actually read the script. Later that year, Carlton rebranded again as Paragon International Pictures, this time with Martin Cohen, which managed to actually shoot Nightmare in Wax (1969), a horror film, and Limbo, a biker film that finally saw release as Rebel Rousers (1970).

Yeah, not to sound like a broken record, but, while these films were both shot in 1967, they both sat on the shelf indefinitely as the money kept disappearing. According to Joyce King (Filmfax, February-April, 2017), who served as the script supervisor on Rebel Rousers, “Things were so bad that the cinematographer (Lazlo Kovacs) and the gaffer (Richard Aggular) would wrap up the film, give it to me, and I’d take it home. Until our checks cleared, they (Carlton and Cohen) didn’t know where the film was. But they brought it on themselves. They treated us like shit.”

Carlton then finally produced a film with Adamson, Blood of Dracula’s Castle, in 1967, which finally got released as a double-bill with Nightmare in Wax in 1969 through Crown International. Neither would see a dime from it. Again, it had taken so long to find a distributor that both films wound up in default to the film processing lab, who foreclosed on them. And so Carlton, once again, was left with nothing -- and screwed over Adamson and Sherman in the process.

Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1968.

“Rex Carlton stood right in front of us,” said Sherman, when they broke the news to him. “And I never saw this before in my life. The man’s blood drained right out of his face. It went from normal color to white as a ghost. And he just had nothing to say. He was speechless.” Two days later, on May 6, 1968, in his apartment on Sunset Boulevard, Rex Carlton got into the bathtub, took a gun, and shot himself in the head. He died at the age of 53.

There’s been a long and unsubstantiated rumor that Carlton killed himself because he lost too much of the mob’s money, whom he had conned into investing in his myriad pictures. Allegedly. According to police reports, this was his second attempt at suicide. He did leave a note, addressed to his brother, which is summed up by “Things weren’t going right.” And after he died, Sherman said, “A lot of shady people began coming out of the woodwork, asking for money owed on the films.” And I’ll let you all extrapolate from there.

For their part, Adamson and Sherman shook off the loss and, tired of getting screwed over by distributors, formed Independent International Pictures in 1969, christened it with the totally bonkers Satan’s Sadists (1969), and never looked back. But that’s another tale for another day, perhaps, because this review is already way too damned long. As for Carlton’s legacy? Well, being a creep, an embezzler, and a liar, it’s probably fitting that he’s best remembered for this dirty little Sci-Fi Sleaze-Noir.

Luckily, the original cut of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die survived the censors blade, which is readily available, with all the gore and skin put back in, on both cheap DVDs or streaming on a YouTube channel near you to enjoy in all its glory. The film was also Mike Nelson’s inaugural feature and riff on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999) when he took over for Joel Hodgson in 1990. Also, the film was apparently remade in 2020 but I’m just not brave enough to give it a spin.

Nah, I’d rather stick with the original. For despite its rotgut cheapness and all of its compromises, what The Brain that Wouldn’t Die lacks in quality or coherence is more than made up for by it’s gonzo execution and sleaze-saturated atmosphere. As Scott Ashlin so eloquently put it in his review at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:

“[This film] is gleefully crass, with a pervasive atmosphere of loutish, leering sexuality that far outstrips the likes of Atom-Age Vampire (1960) or The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), even without any actual nudity, and a take-no-prisoners attitude toward gore and violence that would not be exceeded in the West until Hershel Gordon Lewis unleashed Blood Feast in 1963. And to top it all off, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die features plotting and dialogue so insane that it can easily play in the same league as any of its counterparts from France, Spain, or Italy … There may not be much in the way of bare flesh on the screen, but the tone of this movie is almost unbelievably smutty for its time.”

And I do love it so. 

Published on October 23, 2022, at Confirmed, Alan_01.

The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962) Rex Carlton Productions :: American International Pictures / P: Rex Carlton / AP: Mort Landberg / D: Joseph Green / W: Joseph Green, Rex Carlton / C: Stephen Hajnal / E: Marc Anderson / M: Ed Craig / S: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Anthony La Penna, Adele Lamont, Bonnie Sharie, Paula Morris, Marilyn Hanold, Bruce Brighton, Lola Mason, Doris Brent, Eddie Carmel