carolynpaetow

If you thought "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" was unsophisticated, you oughtta get a load o' this schlock! At least in TBTWD, there was a rudimentary rig set up that was supposed to keep the brain (and its encasing head) from deteriorating. In "They Saved Hitler's Brain" (a really snazzy title!) Der Fuhrer's neatly groomed head sits in a transparent case atop a complex-looking machine. But the case is simply detached and carried around like a hatbox--even taken on a car ride (where bare shoulders are visible). The whole film is a silly, schmalzy slow-starter in which some of the Nazis look like Mafia thugs and no more than half a dozen German words are ever spoken. The actors don't even feign an accent or attempt a Teutonic demeanor. The main (and most interesting) characters are a young "CID" agent and his tag-along wife, who exhibit more sexual passion and playfulness than most players in modern movies. Much of the action and intrigue takes place in a fictitious South American country where at least the nationals have believable accents. It's too bad the Hitler head didn't get more screen time. Although it can speak, it does so on only one occasion, filling the rest of its frames with blackly comedic shifty-eyed, twitchy, rodent-like gesticulations. For bad-movie mavens to miss this one is definitely verboten!

This queer quintet of intended black humor isn't funny in the way the creators apparently envisioned, but funny it is. And, if any of its five tales of the preternatural were a mere one-fourth as good as the intros by John Carradine indicate--well, the viewer could at least stop sighing long enough to allow a slight shiver of trepidation, if not a shudder of laughter. But the only impulse likely to replace the yearn to yawn is indeed the urge to cackle as the sorry scripting and stilted performances grow incredibly worse. The sets and sound quality are reminiscent of early soaps, and a couple of the reoccurring actors carry their early-sixties coifs into nineteenth-century roles. The dialogue at times isn't consistent with the direction, as when one character states that coffee is brewing while pouring it into a cup. (Maybe the director figured that the audience would notice nothing but the busty actress's increasing cleavage!) The accidental humor reaches a crescendo in a Frankensteinesque story in which Lon Chaney Jr. slips into near slapstick as the disjointed dialogue has his mad doctor character babbling like a senile sot. Satire and parody are utterly impossible to achieve when the script for a scene sounds as if it were formulated by two writers, independent of one another. But it does sometimes result in hilarity, as in this film.

The corpse of a Mafia informant, reanimated by powers from beyond, rises nightly from a watery grave to reek vengeance and recover the source of his bodily resurgence. Sounds like the makings of a good parody of everything from Frankenstein to The Mummy to Night of the Living Dead, huh? Well, yeah, but only a few of the laughs in this wannabe lampoon are intentional. A whole lot more of them are not. No satire on earth could be brought to life from such a slipshod script, spartan sets, and profoundly unstellar performances. George Gobel, who could have made a comedic splash with his signature dry and droll personae, is instead doused in a role as a straight-up pedagogue of a prof who explains what asteroids are and such. Most of the movie's attempts at humor fall with a thud harder than a meteor hitting the moon. Sometimes, though--like an elephant joke--it's the sheer flat unfunniness of these attempts that make them so risible. And this film is full of them. There's no time given to introspection in such an uncerebral offering, so the pace never slows down enough to make the movie dull. Like the turquoise-looking asteroid itself, it's something of a little gem.