They Saved Hitler’s Brain is a film you and your family need to see. It’s far from mere entertainment – in fact, it’s not entertaining at all. It’s just a cold, hard look at what happened after the war.
Y’see, when the jig was finally up, these Nazi dudes in the bunker sawed off the Fuhrer’s head and kept it in a jar, where – thanks to surprisingly advanced medical techniques – it continued issuing orders and consulting them on the creation of a Fourth Reich. Fortunately, the good guys found out and chased the Nazi dudes around and, like, somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at the car with the head in it and it melted like a scented candle in a bong shop. There are some facts in between, but the cough medicine I’d ingested to help me “understand” this cinematic milestone was unexpectedly potent.
Originally filmed in the early '60s under the title Madmen of Mandoras (that’s the mythical South American country where the bad guys are holed up with their jarful of “Mister H,” as he is for some reason designated), the film proved too short for TV broadcast and fell into the hands of some other people who shot new footage in 1968.
Now, the original film is truly dreadful – a Z-grade horror flick fraught with painful overacting and a script so retarded that the cast members seem ready to slap their own foreheads in mortification. But the '68 footage makes the original stuff look like David Lean standing on Eisenstein’s shoulders. We’re talking orders of magnitude worse. In fact, I wouldn’t call it so much a film as, oh, what’s the word for a troop of orangutans randomly pointing a camera? I’ll think of it in a minute.
Suffice to say that some catatonic-looking college freaks with too-long hair, some of whom (as has been remarked elsewhere) resemble the Blues Brothers, skulk around and commit acts of lackadaisically rendered mayhem; meanwhile, a spy chick in a miniskirt drives her VW bug to the apartment of a spy guy with a porn-star mustache and they mumble some groaningly awful one-liners about “women’s lib” before discussing secret formulas or something. Imagine a porno flick with all the sex scenes removed and only the “plot” remaining, then imagine the person who was supposed to bring the script smoked it instead.
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Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
A college buddy and I used to have an exam-time tradition. Every semester during finals we would have a "Hitler's Brain Night." We'd rent two or three films, but Hitler's Brain was always the feature - not the one with the '68 footage, mind you, but the original 1963 edit.
Like a great piece of literature, we found something new in it each time - one semester it was the surf-inspired score, another it was that the city in which the film took place was called Dos Palabras ("Two Words"). Watching it became like rereading a favorite poem, one in which you were required to come up with a new "Hitler's Brain" crack every time. (There's an important distinction between Hitler and Hitler's Brain - they share many physical aspects and other traits, but in fact they are two different entities.)
Then we checked IMDb and discovered that it had the alternate title of The Amazing Mr. H. Not as good a title as They Saved Hitler's Brain, but light-years more apropos.
God, what a film. Mach schnell! Mach schnell!
2 - Baronius
Simon - Your article is a worthy homage.