The Atomic Brain (aka Monstrosity) (1964)

Okay lets get something out of the way right from the start.  There is no Atomic Brain in this movie!  What we have here is a silly movie about an elderly woman that wants to have a young body to live it up in!  To that end she enlists the help of a discredited scientist named Otto Frank who has a theory that he can transplant brains into new bodies with the help of the atom.  He early experiments use various animal brains (a dog and cat specifically) and the fresh corpses that he gets from the local graveyard.  These turn out mixed results so he recommends they get some live volunteers for the old woman to choose from.  After the old woman picks her new body much mayhem ensues, including murder and betrayal.  Then the credits roll.

There are a lot of forgotten classics from the 50s and 60s.  Then there are movies like the Atomic Brain that should were forgotten for a reason.  The movie was shot quickly (10 days) and on a very low budget.  Now for me that doesn’t’ mean the movie can’t be good, I love Roger Corman movies from the same era, but here the thing just falls flat.  The story is hackneyed and silly, though not in a good way.  Just because you might shoot the movie fast you should still put some effort into writing a script with a beginning, middle, and end.  The Atomic Brain has the feeling of a movie that just sort of meanders along until it is long enough to be considered feature length and then ends.  This makes for a very long and boring 64 minutes.   If the script weren’t bad enough the acting doesn’t help at all.  Which is surprising since many of the featured actors and actresses did a lot of work in supporting roles on T.V. 

The special effects border more on the extremely silly than they do anything else.  You get a weird dog man combination and a woman that walks around hissing like a cat.  That is what passes for creatures in the movie.  There is one gag with an eye ball that is sort of funny and might have been horrifying in the mid 60s, but falls flat now.  I was kind of impressed with the mad scientists lab and atomic reactor, which might be where they spent the budget.

In the end this is nothing more than a goofy and dumb attempt to cash in on the boom of sci-f/horror during the decades of the 50s and 60s.  Like many movies that try to cash in they miss the point of what made the other movies fun.  Making a dry and overly serious dramatic movie instead of a fun guy in a suit creature feature just doesn’t work.  This is for the hardcore fans only.  I recommend everyone else skip The Atomic Brain.

½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer