Does "The Brain That Wouldn’t Die" really have a cult following or was someone pulling my leg? I mean it’s better than getting kicked in the teeth but so is a wedgie. Well, maybe that’s debatable. The title is a little misleading, by the way. A better title would be “The Head That Couldn’t Die.”

The story is all about an unconventional doctor who has found a way to give life back to the dead. He is also on the verge of revolutionizing the field of transplantation. When his girlfriend is decapitated in an auto accident he revives her head keeping it alive in a blood solution with the help of his machines. That’s no way to live so he sets out to find a body for her. He will have to commit murder, but that’s a small price to pay for the life of his love.

He’s confident he can make the head transplant work. The problem is that the bodyless head is not the same person as the woman that died. I mean how traumatized would you feel if you were nothing more than a head on a platter? She doesn’t want to continue to live and she has developed the power to communicate with a caged, inhuman monstrosity that is the result of a previous experiment. She’ll use that power to put a stop to all this craziness.

If there’s one thing I can say good about this movie it’s that the disembodied head looks pretty good. They really did a good job of selling this as nothing more than a head on a pan. Of course it’s obvious that the actor’s body is hidden beneath the table, but the masking of that encasement is impressive. No green screen effects here, folks.

There’s a lot that’s not so impressive, though. For one thing a lot of the acting is not all that great. Even when it’s decent it falls too easily into the realm of cheesy. Another problem is that some of the scenes feel redundant. The worst of this is at the beginning when the doctor is arguing with his father over the concept of trying his new procedures on human subjects. His father thinks it’s wrong to “experiment” on humans. This argument goes on and on with virtually the same points made over and over. While not boring the acting and redundancy make the pace tedious and spoils what could have been good development or tension.

I guess some of the visual innovations were enough to earn this movie the respect of some, but I was hoping for more. Perhaps the plight of the living head touches some in more profound ways. She will use the powers she's developed to put an end to her suffering and stop her doctor boyfriend from carrying on with his experiments. She gets psychotic about it, but her pain does make her sympathetic. Similarly, the doctor, who does not appear at all to be a bad guy at first, allows his own pain to drive him to do evil against other people. It's an interesting dynamic.