Showing posts with label 60s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 60s. Show all posts

Review: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)
Director: Joseph Green
Writers: Rex Carlton (original story), Joseph Green (original story), 1 more credit »
Stars: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Anthony La Penna



“Let me die. Let me die!”

Is that the sound of despair from an audience member watching the last Indiana Jones film? Or maybe the plea for mercy you make when you find out your kid likes Justin Bieber? Perhaps it's the catchphrase of that Idols judge everyone loves to hate? Or could it be the wail of a woman – with nothing but a black screen showing- that makes this one of the most effective opening moments of a horror film ever?

Yes, it's all of the above. But that doesn't take away from how creepy that introduction is in this horror film. It works and it's disturbing. It's almost as good as the scream at the start of the original House on Haunted Hill, the first murder in Scream or any of the other best intro teasers out there. Start with a bang, that's always a good lesson with movies.

Of course, then you've got to follow it up with another good hour or two of viewing. This one doesn't. In fact, the intro is the best part of this film – except for when The End flashes on the screen later.

Doctor Bill Cortner is one of those maverick surgeons who breaks all those pesky rules and ethics that hamper medical advancements. You know, like performing experimental surgery on the newly-dead, bringing them back to life and stealing limbs from amputees. His dad doesn't like it, but Bill is a rebel like Victor Frankenstein. He's off to the family summer house/private laboratory with his hot-to-trot fiancée Jan at 10 mph, but she won't stop nagging him. He accelerates wildly on some dangerous curves just to shut her up, and promptly crashes.

He's thrown clear, but she gets decapitated. Let that be a lesson, kids. Speed kills.

Being an upstanding guy, he doesn't bother waiting for the authorities but rather grabs her severed head and takes it to the summer house. Like any good doctor would, he clamps her head in a vice, pops it in a pan of magical medical goop and brings it back to life. Since he still wants to get busy with Jan, he figures all he has to do is transplant her head on another woman's body. It means the other woman will die, but that's the price of progress.

While he sets out on the dreary task of attending burlesque bars, beauty pageants and bikini photo sessions looking for the perfect woman, Jan's severed head is doing what she does best: nag. She nags at Cortner's assistant, and then at one of his earlier test subjects who remains locked away. She's also telepathic now and uses that skill to nag even more. All she wants to do is die, but revenge is an equally acceptable alternative.

I'd tell you the ending, but I won't. Not because I disapprove of spoilers, but because there isn't much of an ending to speak of. It's there, but if you blink, you'll miss it. It scores for revealing what the test subject monster looks like but fails because it looks like the lovechild of Sloth and Tor Johnson.

One of the biggest problems with this film is that there are no actual heroes; Jan is a pain, and you wish that she would die just so she'd stop complaining, while Dr. Cortner has all the appeal of a block of wood and half the charisma. The film feels soulless. It's a cheap exploitation film that doesn't even pretend to be anything more, with no actual horror and drawn-out shots of pointless eye candy.

Oh, and there's the problem that it was made at all. But then if it weren't then we wouldn't have anything to laugh at, right? So, I guess we owe it something for that.


Thankfully, there's that great introduction to hang on to. And the words, The End, which can't seem to arrive fast enough. The rest is filling, bland and leaving a bad taste behind. Spit it out after consumption. 

- Rick Austin

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Review: Psycho Beach Party (2000)

Psycho Beach Party (2000)
Director: Robert Lee King
Writer: Charles Busch
Starring: Lauren Ambrose, Nicholas Brendan, Charles Busch, Matt Keeslar, Thomas Gibson, Amy Adams, Kimberley Davies



Both a loving tribute and merciless send-up of exploitation cinema, Psycho Beach Party gathers the best tropes from three decades of B-movies and tosses them into a joyful stew. Based on the long-running play written by Charles Busch, the film's influences are written right in the title: the Frankie and Annette teen romps of the 1950s and 60s mashed up with the Hitchcockian psychodramas and slasher films of the 60s and 70s. As a capper, Psycho Beach Party then takes the sexual subtext of all those genres and turns it into text, both with single-entendre sex puns and even less subtle kink. More playful than graphic, the film revels in young sexuality in ways that feel more like Beach Blanket Bingo than Halloween, yet still treats the audience to the image of Marvel Anne (Amy Adams) lecturing Starcat (Nicholas Brendon) on responsibility while covering her naked pudenda with nothing but her hands.

Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose) is an innocent teen who, unlike every other teen, goes to the drive-in to watch the movie and is both fascinated and repulsed by all the necking going on in the surrounding cars. But Chicklet has a dark secret. Whenever she sees a circle, another personality takes over and she becomes the aggressive dominatrix, Ann Bowman (gasp!). Foul mouthed, lewd and sophisticated, Ann Bowman proclaims her desires and hatreds with operatic flourish: "Who do I have to fuck to get a hot dog in this place?"



Later, on Malibu beach, Chicklet meets a cadre of surfers led by The Great Kanaka (Thomas Gibson). She's immediately attracted by college dropout and first year psych student, Starcat and begs the boys to teach her to surf. Starcat insists that girls can't surf, citing first year Freudian nonsense about penis envy and the male hunting instinct. When Chicklet takes her case directly to Kanaka, Ann Bowman steps in, and not only gets Chicklet into the surf, but makes Kanaka her sex slave.

Meanwhile, a killer is stalking and murdering the teens one by one and police captain Monica Stark (Charles Busch) realizes that Chicklet is at the center of the mystery. Could Ann Bowman be responsible?

If it all sounds ridiculous, it's because it's meant to. The period movies Psycho Beach Party lampoons were no less so. Using naive and flat out wrong ideas about insanity, 60s psychodramas told thinly veiled cautionary tales about female hysteria and sexual repression. "Schizophrenia" (later called multiple personality disorder or dissociative disorder) was a go-to diagnosis for crazy people in the movies because it was lurid and strange. Norman Bates being the most famous example.


Psycho Beach Party plays on the plot details of those earlier works beat for beat, only it has the sense to turn it into a funny. In essence, Psycho Beach Party is the cinematic equivalent of watching a dozen B-movies all at once and riffing them with your giggling friends. The brilliance of Psycho Beach Party is that you never have to have seen an Annette Funicello movie to get the joke, because like all great satires, Psycho Beach Party is both a parody of the genre and a beautiful example of the genre.


There's also a luau dance battle. Luau. Dance. Battle.

- Katherine Turner