La Femme nue et Satan

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.

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.

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.

"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".

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Victor Trivas; Produced by Wolf Hartwig, for Rapid Film; Released in America as "The Head" by Trans-Lux Film Distributing. Screenplay by Victor Trivas; Photography by Georg Krause; Edited by Friedel Buckow; Music by Willy Mattes. Starring: Horst Frank, Karin Kernke, Michel Simon, Helmut Schmid, Christiane Maybach and Dieter Eppler.

Gooey thriller featuring an hysterical sequence where a sentimental hunchbacked young lady receives a body transplant (involuntarily donated) from a stripper played by Christiane Maybach, who later was featured in films by the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

I saw this film at the Hippodrome theater in downtown Cleveland in 1961. As a promotion, a "shrunken head" trinket was handed out to patrons at the box office.