Cast: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniels, Adele Lamont, Bonnie Sharie, Paula Maurice. Eddie Carmel
Welcome to another edition of Saturday Night Horror at the Psycho Ward! This week, we're skipping to Disc 6, Side A for this popular early 60s horror classic.
THE PLOT: Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is a doctor working under his father's shadow. Like every mad scientist we've ever seen at the movies, he is convinced that he can bring the dead back to life by giving them the body of someone else and injecting a special serum into them so that their blood and everything else will cooperate with their new body.
When his fiancee, Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) dies in a car accident, Bill is overjoyed to find that she has been decapitated. He doesn't realize that he's probably the only person in the world that would have that reaction to a decapitation. He takes her head back to the lab (evil laugh goes here) and connects it to all these tubes, and then goes on a mission to find a woman with the perfect body. While he's doing this, the monster in the closet (Eddie Carmel), at the command of Jan's head, kills Kurt, the loveable assistant who pushed Jan's buttons a bit too much, by ripping his arm off. Poor Kurt. He was my favorite. :(
After searching in a few places, he finally finds what he's looking for in Doris, an old friend. He takes her back to his home, drugs her, and begins to experiment on her. Jan, who now hates Bill because of what he plans to do to her, speaks up and says that she doesn't want a new body. Bill reacts in the only way he knows how: by doing the same thing he's done the entire movie and treating her like a three-year-old and taping her mouth shut.
Bill makes the same mistake that Kurt made and stands in front of the open hatch of the monster's closet. The monster grabs him in a headlock and finally gets the door open. We finally get to see the monster, who has a cone-like head and an eye on his forehead. Its skin is horribly wrinkled. I screamed. The thing sets the lab on fire and carries Doris to safety, so in the end you have to cheer for the monster, you know?
THE REVIEW: This film is quite graphic, not just sexually, but it does have an intense amount of blood when Kurt is murdered. The thing you have to remember is that by the 60s, the Hayes Code was easing up a bit and by 1969, there were films with sex scenes. Granted, there are no sex scenes in this film, but the sexual content does make its presence known.
This film is also known as The Head That Wouldn't Die, which makes a hell of a lot more sense. Going into this film, I thought it was going to be a sci-fi thriller, 50s-style, with a mutant brain. Jan does mention that her brain is connected with the monster in the closet's brain, but we don't physically see a brain.
When I heard "monster in the closet," I immediately thought of Karloff's Frankenstein monster. It's a mad scientist film, remember?
All in all, this film was a good scare and there is something about mad scientist films that makes them never get old. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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