Virginia Leith gets a plum role of sorts as an angry (justifiably so) and vindictive severed head in the otherwise unremarkable The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Shot in 1959 under the title The Black Door (and sometimes sporting the title The Head That Wouldn’t Die), Joseph Green’s film is a turgid science fiction film occasionally spiced with some tacky exploitation business.

Opening with a plaintive woman’s cry of “let me die,” the film introduces us to father and son doctors, Dr Cortner (Bruce Brighton – his character isn’t important enough to warrant a first name) and Bill (Jason Evers). Junior saves a patient during an operation, but his old man isn’t impressed by his cavalier behaviour at the scalpel (“An operating room is no place to experiment.”) While driving home with his fiancée Jan Compton (Leith), Cortner is involved in a car crash – he’s thrown clear of the wreckage, but Kan is decapitated. Rushing her severed head back to the lab, he manages to revive it with the help of his assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna) but Jan is in agony and begs them to let her die. Cortner hits on a sleazy plan to kill a woman with the “perfect” body onto which he will transplant Jan’s head and heads for the nearest strip joint (like you do…) in search of victims. Meanwhile, Jan finds that she can communicate telepathically with a mutant (Eddie Carmel), the result of an earlier experiment by Cortner, that is kept locked up in a cell adjacent to the lab.

The independently shot The Brain That Wouldn’t Die languished on a shelf for three years until it was picked up by American International Pictures who stripped it of three minutes or so of its more outré material (an uncut version rediscovered in 2002, reveals more of a cat fight between strippers and some extra gore) and dumped it on a double bill with Bruno VeSota’s feeble Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962). Compared to VeSota’s farcical “comedy” The Brain That Wouldn’t Die looks like some sort of twisted masterpiece but really, it’s all complete nonsense, though there’s something perversely enjoyable about its po-faced earnestness.

There’s a lot of talk and most of it isn’t all that interesting and the acting is… peculiar. Not quite stilted but not entirely naturalistic either. Almost al of them are a degree or two off-kilter with only Leith, who spends most of the film sitting under a table, her head poking through a hole and sneering at anyone who passes by, is a lot of fun. The film is at its most fun when she’s allowed to hold court, relishing the script’s better lines (“No, my deformed friend, like all quantities, horror has it’s ultimate, and I am that.”)

But Green and his co-writer Rex Carlton – who also had a hand in the far better Unearthly Stranger the following year but went back to his roots for the terrible Nightmare in Wax (1969) and Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969) – grow as tired of the tiny. Poorly decorated laboratory set as we do so leave poor Leith stranded as the strike out for more exploitative fare. They take us off to a strip joint where, inevitably we get to sit through one of the performers” routine, bringing the already glacial pacing juddering to a halt. Although the film is more daring than most films made in 1959, she doesn’t go all the way and just gyrates about a bit as bored patrons look on.

Green tries to liven things up with a hair-tugging, eye-scratching cat fight between two of the women (“Why, you cheap, third grade stripper… I’ll mash you on the butt!”) that, as noted, plays longer in the uncut version, but it’s to no avail. It’s hard to believe that they’d be driven to violence over the walking charisma void that is Cortner and the scene ends with a “comic” bit of business involving painted cats on the gaudy frieze that decorates the dressing room letting out a camp “meow!” The film is less coy when it comes to some unexpected gore. An arm is ripped off, leaving the victim to stagger about in an increasingly bloody lab coat and Cortner is finally brought to book when the hideous mutant he keeps locked up in the lab escapes and takes a bite out of his neck, the creature contemptuously throwing the lump of gristle to the ground.

Perhaps inevitably, the film fell foul of the ever-unfunny Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew and proved to be a favourite with the show’s fans. Carlton – who also co-produced with Mort Landberg – had plans for The Return of the Brain That Wouldn’t Die but the critical shellacking it received put paid to that. As inevitably as an appearance on MST3K, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die has picked up an army of fans over the years and one of them, Derek Carl, inexplicably directed a remake in 2020 that restages some scenes almost shot-for-shot and pilfers Abe Baker and Tony Restaino’s distinctive score almost in its entirety.