User reviews

Before Re-animator (1985), before The Thing With Two Heads (1972) and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971), and even before The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), there was The Head, a tawdry low-budget German sci-fi/horror in which mad scientist Dr.Ood (Horst Frank) keeps the decapitated head of his mentor Professor Dr. Abel (Michel Simon) alive on a trolley and stitches the beautiful noggin of hunchbacked nun Irene Sander (Karin Kernke) onto the body of skeezy stripper Lilly (Christiane Maybach).

It's delightfully lurid nonsense, packed with scenes of cheap titillation (although my print seemed to have been clumsily shorn of some possible nudity) and macabre madness, none of which will seem in the slightest bit shocking these days, but which do possess an endearing charm that fans of schlock horror will positively lap up. Ood, in particular, is a wonderfully memorable character, the deviant doctor not averse to making moves on his patchwork patient as soon as she comes round from her op—mind you, with the head (and brain) of a beautiful yet innocent nun and the body of a hot bimbo, who can blame him?

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

It was fun to read other commentators concerning the actors in this film. Otherwise, the whole thing would have been a pretty disappointing effort. As it is, the premise is kind of dumb. We must suspend our disbelief and accept the fact that a head can be kept alive. I suppose I'm not supposed to ask why the guy can talk without lungs and other respiratory apparatus. The scientist is mad (why are they always so crazy?). A kindly hunchbacked nurse gets a new body from a stripper and has trouble dealing with it (as most of use would). There is this kind of German Aryan thing going on. I can't quite put my finger on it. The movie has an interesting atmosphere but it is pretty bleak and painful. Of course, the talking head thing has been done again, including by prime time news commentators. Still, once you buy into it, it's an OK presentation.

Made three years before "The Brain That Wouldn't Die", this atmospheric chiller about a madman/genius who steals the work of a great scientist and extends it to evil ends works better than you might expect. The sets are interesting and extensive, the characters have more depth and color than your average American B movie, and the soundtrack is interesting and different as well. In a couple of scenes, it reminded me of the B&W Julian Roffman movie "The Mask". Has this antique curiousity for only $5.99. It's worth it, IMHO.

I've seen too many examples of prime Euro-Sleaze to not notice a notch or two above the rest and this creeper fits that description .This offbeat mad scientist film has a similar story to the far more famous and campier The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Both were made in the very same year,though The Head made it to American screens a year earlier while the producer of the other flick haggled with AIP for a better distribution deal.Both films would be great to play on a double bill as both are sexually charged but the tones are on opposite sides of the spectrum.Though the dubbing is as poor a usual foreign efforts it's apparent that The head is much more concerned with being a professional movie with a taste for the gutter as opposed to The Brain that wouldn't Die which is trash hoping to be accepted.The acting for the most part is much better and the effects of the transplant while just as unreasonable in theory are handled with superior care than in the drive-in romp from the states.Now don't get me wrong,it is a cheesy B movie but it's nicely adult and takes care to keep a consistent mood of artiness and Angst.Where as The Brain That Wouldn't Die became famous for it's early gore scenes,the Head is far more focused on arousal.It's obvious that a minute or two was snipped from the German version. At least once in the strip club and then again as Irina admires her new body.This film being longer than the other by a good eighteen minutes means it gives it time to be a bit more complicated plot wise than just man removes head,man gets head new body and during the last two minutes we get a whole new piece of information that allows for a less traditional ending.The Brain That Wouldn't Die is tons mores fun but this makes for a good rainy night entry for that trash-aholic film lover.

"The Head" is a genuinely odd German horror film. Although it dealt with contemporary themes and had a contemporary cast and production design, the sound, cinematography and direction are more like a silent. A "mad scientist" protege uses his teacher's discovery to perform a head transplant. He grafts the head of a beautiful young hunchback onto the body of a stripper. That's pretty much the plot. The scenes in the strip club work all right, but in every other film location, there's an absence of "room tone". That's local sound a film sound recordist adds to create a consistent "atmosphere" in a movie scene. Otherwise, a scene comes across as flat and otherworldly. The photography also lends to this silent or early 30ish atmosphere. The editing contains many fades for no good reason that to cover bad continuity. The acting varies from contemporary to exaggerated theatrical. It's too bad writer/director Victor Trivas fails to establish a consistent style. It's also too bad, but only a minor quibble, that actress Karin Kernke, who plays the hunchback is a lot bustier than actress Christiane Maybach, who plays the stripper. At 63, director Trivas might not have noticed, but most younger guys would. With consistent storyline, fairly good music and fine sets, I think "The Head" is worth at least a "5".

The Head is a sort of Euro variant on the cult schlockfest The Brain that Wouldn't Die. Similar to that one, it's a little salacious for its time and it prominently features disembodied heads held captive in laboratories by mad doctors. This one isn't as good as its American counterpart to be fair but it's still pretty decent all things considered. It was made in West Germany and it's a sci-fi horror about head transferral experiments. The odd Doctor Ood keeps his recently deceased dead colleague Doctor Able's head alive, much to the powerless Able's annoyance! Meanwhile, a hunchback nurse who Ood is infatuated with is given a stripper's body by our mad scientist.

Horst Frank plays Ood. He played a flamboyantly homosexual scientist in Dario Argento's giallo The Cat o' Nine Tails. He's a pretty decent actor and he is good value for money here, although it's not really a film that relies on acting performances in all honesty. The soundtrack was also quite notable also for being much better than most from the time. It really added a lot to the atmosphere. Overall, though, The Head possibly peters out a bit towards the end and loses a bit of its earlier impetus which is unfortunate but there was enough entertaining schlock earlier to keep me happy for the most part.

A mysterious new doctor arrives at Dr. Abel's laboratory. Abel is doing advanced surgical techniques, but he has an urgent problem. He needs a heart transplant or he will die shortly. When the doctor's heart begins to fail before the operation can take place, the new mysterious doctor takes an extreme step to save him.

What a fascinating and ambitious picture this is. It's a curious amalgam of styles and forms. It has the pace and luminosity of an old silent (little wonder; it's German); the stateliness of a Universal classic; the surrealism of a French art-horror film; the visceral draw and psychological depth of the Italian Giallo; the seedy glamor of a Roger Corman cheapie; and the liminal otherness of a Mexican horror flick. The set design and compositions are superb, making the most of limited resources; and the use of space and the fluid camera work help to lend some real style.

It's well acted too, and manages to generate genuine pathos (the 'head' of the title could be either doctor). The director keeps things moving and there are no boring lulls at any point, but it doesn't speed along and leave incomprehensible gaps in the plot either. Great use of mirrors and symmetry; and it has a fantastic score with a nightmarish quality that adds to the creepy atmosphere. It is an obvious inspiration for 1962's The Brain That Wouldn't Die, only this is much, much better.

One of the oddest German horror flicks of the 1950s, The Head has not one but two mad scientists. One of them has found a way to remove the head from a dog and keep it alive. The second nut job removes the first scientist's head after he dies and keeps it alive on a table. Then he murders a stripper and grafts the head of a crippled nurse onto the stripper's body. Understandably, the woman becomes confused about her identity. Expressionistic sets remind us we're watching a German film. The acting is all bug eyes and wide-open mouths. One intriguing element for us guys: The nurse with the stripper's body goes to bed with her artist friend and then beds down with the second mad scientist (it's a Svengali kind of thing). The film is dubbed, and it is ripe for MST3K type coverage, if in fact it wasn't already. Noting special here, but certainly gruesome enough without being outright gory.

Psychotic Dr Ood (crazy-eyed Frank) is a maniacal genius who has the opportunity to perform a miraculous operation with a secret serum Z, when his boss dies on the operating table mid-experiment. Preserving Michel Simon's head for the purposes of its extraordinary brain content, the twisted Dr Ood is soon looking for another victim on whom to perform his gruesome experiments, when the crippled Sister Irene (Kernke) reluctantly agrees to undergo an operation that promises to correct her debilitating condition, stooped like Quasimodo with a shuffling gait to match. But the once unassuming woman, who cannot bear to look upon her hideous deformity, soon discovers that perfection comes at an unaffordable cost.

Frank is unhinged as a deranged Doctor who makes serious overtures toward Kernke, even after he's turned her into some perverted Frankenstein's monster. Veteran French actor Simon is given little to do but screw up his face while his head sits atop a water cooler, sans body. Kernke has a likable character and Dieter Eppler makes a reasonable fist of the hero, even if he's something of a cuckold. You might also recognise prolific German-International actor Helmut Schmid as the docile mechanical engineer Bert who becomes concerned with Dr Ood's peculiar activities.

Occasionally atmospheric and displaying good use of sets and lighting, the preposterous premise shouldn't necessarily paint itself into a corner, after all, Jason Evers succeeded in "The Brain that Wouldn't Die" and even Steve Martin was able to coax a laugh or two from "The Man With Two Brains" (I won't include "The Thing with Two Heads" in this analogy). Frank is better than the material with which he had to work, yet unfortunately, his credentials don't spare much goodwill on this modest little sci-fi that attempts to double as a psycho-thriller but fails to reach its potential.

Very interesting "b" movie about a mad scientist that manages to keep a dog's head alive after severing it from it's body, well another scientist is very interesting,, almost too interested in trying this on a human subject,, after he meets the man they get into an argument and the mad scientist severes his head and has a bunch of suction cups thingys and pumps that keep oxygen flowing to the brain,, then there is this girl that works there and she walks like a hunchback, so the mad scientist wants to help her, and he finds a stripteaser with a perfect little body,, he performs an operation and there you have it,, no more hunchback,, but this is where it just starts to get interesting, but I won't go any further you will just have to watch and see,, very comparable to the brain that wouldn't die,, but I think actually better than that one.

One can easily tell the plot from the title. A head living without a body, or on another body.

In this movie, it is both.

This is a "mad scientist" film.

The reason this works is because science fiction is "science fiction", so we don't worry about the "unrealistic" premise of a head being attached to a different person's body.

That's because it is just "one premise." Only one item to suspend belief over.

And good science fiction, in fact, any good Fiction, is "credible characters in incredible circumstances".

Here, the "circumstance" is really the one "mad scientist". The "head" is just a "symptom" of the "disease".

The difference between the "poor" and "superior" mad scientist movies is the other characters. The poor movie will have the mad scientist simply being a god that no one but a hero and heroine can stand up to.

This film is a "superior" mad scientist film, because there are many characters who react to the lunatic in their own way. The film is a great blend of the suspense and horror along with the characters who eventually come to realize the man with them is insane.

I think that what we have here is an ok German 1950s B movie that didn't translate very well into English. It's an interesting movie, and has the elements that could make it a good movie, but it just doesn't fit together well. Something seemed to be lacking and at times it even became boring. I didn't care for the acting but a lot of that could have to do with the dubbed English that at times didn't fit the characters. The sets were pretty good. The ending was poorly done as though they couldn't think of a way to end the movie. It was nice to see a more obscure sci-fi / horror movie on DVD but this movie isn't for everyone. It certainly isn't anything to go out of your way to see. It probably would have been better in it's original German. In English it just falls short.

From the very start this was much better than I had expected and despite an obvious low budget and some wooden acting, a very spirited piece with decent sets, spooky exterior shooting and very good soundtrack. Indeed there is much to enjoy here and it is just such a shame that all comes undone in the final reel. Oh how slowly this grinds to an end after so much has gone so right. A really strange film with some lovely ideas, indeed someone enterprising might consider a remake. We are talking mad scientists, of course, and the Germanic flavour here adds another dimension. Severed heads and transplants adds another, not to mention a hunchback nurse and a striptease club! So a little more of the 'lovely body', more focus on the central story and a decent finale would mean a film to shout about. Even in this state I enjoyed it, but for those interminable last fifteen/twenty minutes. Great shame but always worth a look.

Sure, it looks like just another severed head movie with a bit of salaciousness thrown in, but there's more here than meets the eye. Under the guise of a standard issue mad scientist SF flick, there's a clear undertone of horror at what the members of a supposedly noble profession are capable of given the right inducement. In 1959, Germany was still coming to grips with one of the most shocking aspects of the Nazi regime: the ease and depth to which the medical profession was subverted and enlisted in the state's insane agenda of racial purification. To that end, doctors were given free rein to perform experiments on Jews, the mentally ill, Roma, Soviet POWs, and others that were universally condemned for their total disregard for life and ethics. Any of a number of lines in this film echo the justifications the doctors attempted to use when they were put on trial. There's also the use of the full moon-which I made fun of through the first half of the film, until I realized that there was a purpose for showing it to us. The association with madness (or lycanthropy!), as well as the revelation that Ood was experimented on himself, and was now both a legitimate doctor AND a raving madman, neatly parallels the way the world, and most Germans after the trials, saw the doctors who so willingly went along with and enabled Nazi savagery.

Forget The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a piece of Hollywood shock schlock that deserved the MST3K treatment. While hardly high art, The Head is a movie that had something significant to say to its intended audience. Just as Godzilla is not just a monster movie, this is not just a mad scientist film.