Brains 2

In The Man With Two Brains there is a scene where Steve Martin is looking at prostitutes to find a body to transplant his brain girlfriend into. It's a scene I suppose is influenced by a similar scene in The Brain That Wouldn't Die, so I had to go find it among my dvds and make a double feature out of it.

We follow a doctor and his girlfriend driving to his laboratory in the countryside where he is experimenting with transplants of bodyparts. The car goes off the road and his girlfriend is decapitated. He takes the head with him to the laboratory and brings it back to life. Locked in a closet is an experiment gone wrong, a man that has been mutated into a monster. We don't see him, just hear sounds he is making.

The movie is obviously very low budget, but it's the thing that gives the film its charm and dreamlike quality. The girlfriend is played by Virginia Leith, and why she didn't get an Oscar for her performance I don't know. She has the most expressive eyes and the creepiest laughter ever. It becomes clear that she has some sort of mindcontrol over the monster in the closet, creating this strangely powerful scene where she asks the monster questions and he answers by banging on the door.

Meanwhile we see the doctor searching for a new body for his girlfriend. He visits a stripclub where two strippers find him so irresistible that they get into a catfight, the whole point of the scene being for us to see their jiggling breasts. You can sort of imagine the director of the film being a bit turned on by this and going, Sorry, that scene was a bit out of focus, could you do it again, please?

It's a film that is easy to laugh at, but then you would also miss the qualities it has. The biggest mistake is that in the end they show us the monster in the closet, and all the mystery of the film falls apart.