Saturday Night Creature Feature: The Brain that Wouldn't Die

As panned as this film is, it's really quite compelling. The set-up is basic: your average scientist-doctor-genius (Dr. Cortner) has discovered a way, he thinks, to cheat death and achieve the transplantation of body parts from one person to another. However, in rushing to his secret laboratory in the country with his girlfriend, the smart, attentive, but somewhat frumpy Jan, he gets in an accident. He is thrown clear of the car, but she is decapitated, and her body burns up. Dr. Cortner, is, however, able to save her head and keeps it alive in his laboratory. He promises to look for a new body for her.

At this point, the movie splits into two different narratives. In one narrative, Dr. Cortner goes seeking a new body for his girlfriend. He looks all the places guys might look for the ideal body and in so doing stumbles through the entire culture of men's objectification of women in the 50s: a burlesque, strip, or dance club; a swimsuit competition (to which he is invited. As a doctor he is considered to have a superior knowledge of female anatomy.), and a private swimsuit modeling session where men pay to take pictures in the privacy of the woman's apartment. Thus, the movie foregrounds a lot of fetishist subculture from the day (it even includes some girl-on-girl wrestling that, if not well-coordinated, is titillating), but it goes further. Because Dr. Cortner is looking at these women as potential bodies for his girlfriend, it puts forward the critique that men who engage in these behaviors view the other women in their lives through the lens of their depravity.

Meanwhile, the brain (often referred to as "Jan in the Pan") is awakening to its own power. Freed of its body, kept alive by Dr. Cortner's special solution, she discovers that the can psychically communicate with Dr. Cortner's other experiment. Locked in the closet is a mindless brute, a being put together out of discarded body parts, tremendously strong but horribly deformed. Virginia Leith does an excellent job of delivering her lines with a cold, detached, sinister determination (sometimes she sounds like the Bene Gesserit from David Lynch's Dune). She will free the body in the closet and together they will . . . well, I wasn't quite clear on that, other than kill Dr. Cortner's assistant and thwart the doctor's plan.

That's right--she doesn't want a new body because it will be murder. So when Dr. Cortner shows up with the body he's chosen (the private swimsuit model. She has a beautiful body, but her face has been deformed by a man who abused her trust.) , Jan in the Pan unleashes the deformed creature on him. The creature tears out his throat with its teeth, then rescues the swimsuit model from the laboratory which has been inadvertently set on fire.

The final meaning of the film (if it can be said to have one) probably lies in what interpretation you make of the thing in the closet. Some critics read it as a homosexual reference. Although it's impossible to avoid this reading in this day and age, I don't feel it's a good reading, despite the fact that its head is pretty phallic (and he has only one eye). Dr. Cortner and his assistant refer to it as their mistakes. Does this then mean that a smart woman will turn a man's mistakes against him to prevent his final triumph? Or does it mean that a smart woman, despite her unattractiveness, will fend off a more attractive rival, even if it means destroying the man she loves?