The Head (1959)

I love this movie so much

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

Professor Abel (a sturdy portrayal by Michel Simon) creates a serum that enables human heads to stay alive after the body dies. After Abel suffers a heart attack, his crazed assistant Dr. Brandt (expertly essayed with sinister aplomb by Horst Frank) uses the serum to keep Abel's head alive and plans to transplant the head of beautiful, but hunchbacked nurse Irene Sander (a sound and sympathetic performance by the lovely Karin Kernke) onto the sumptuous body of exotic dancer Stella (sexy blonde Christiane Maybach). Writer/director Victor Travis relates the compelling story at a steady pace and treats the potentially lurid subject matter with admirable taste and restraint. Moreover, this film is acted with praiseworthy conviction and sincerity by the able cast, with Kernke a touching stand-out throughout. While there isn't much in the way of action, this picture is nonetheless still worth seeing for several nifty visual flourishes, the brooding somber mood, and the complex relationships between the unusually well-etched characters.

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.