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The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

Of all the cheesy horror movies to ever be broadcast in the “chiller theatre” TV time slots of the 1960s and ’70s, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die must be the sleaziest.

Shot in 1959 and released in 1962, this amazing Hollywood cheapie is about Dr. Cortner (Jason Evers), a renegade surgeon whose experiments with reviving dead people are deemed unsavoury. When his fiancée, Jan (Virginia Leith), is decapitated in a car accident, the doc goes to extreme measures to keep her head alive, hilariously setting it in an electrified pan on a table. The lecherous doc seeks out a woman with a fabulous body to serve as a transplant donor, haunting burlesque night clubs and camera clubs. Jan’s head isn’t entirely happy with this situation and seeks to subvert her boyfriend’s efforts by telepathically turning one of his monstrous mutant experiments against him. (Interesting trivia: the monster is played by Eddie Carmel, the subject of the famous Diane Arbus photo A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents.)

At one point, the monster rips off the arm of the doctor’s assistant, but still more gory horror awaits as Jan takes her heady revenge.

The film has inspired three different stage musicals (one of which features the catchy lyric: “My medulla oblongata is working harder than it oughta”). It’s also been ridiculed on TV by both Elvira and the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Shout Factory deemed the public-domain film worthy of a handsome Blu-ray restoration. But they hedge their bets by including the MST3K version, which includes Mike Nelson’s coining of the immortal expression “Jan in the pan.”

An added bonus is a silent “international” version of the camera-club scene in which the doc pays a visit to a disfigured model. (“International” is a code word denoting nudity.) It’s pretty tame by contemporary standards, but it sends the movie’s already considerable skeevy factor right off the charts. ***

Sicario

AN FBI agent (Emily Blunt), confronted by her powerlessness in an ongoing war with Mexican drug cartels, is drawn deeper into the dark heart of the conflict when she is pressed to partner with a couple of members (Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro) of a special task force of, shall we say, questionable legal ethics.

Quebec director Denis Villeneuve, partnered with ace cinematographer Roger Deakins, delivers a movie with a nerve-jangling blunt impact, especially in its portrayal of a violence-ridden Mexican border town as something as horrifying and nightmarish as an Hieronymus Bosch hellscape.

This is the movie the weird Ridley Scott misfire The Counselor (2013) tried to be. ****

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca