By Steve Stones
For fans of truly bad films, The Atomic Brain is required viewing. Bad films just don’t get much worse than The Atomic Brain (AKA Monstrosity), unless you’re viewing Manos: The Hands of Fate or The Creeping Terror. It helps that the film was spoofed on the wildly popular TV series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 back in the mid-1990s. The MST3K treatment of the film makes it a more watchable experience.
A rich old woman living in a gated mansion is obsessed with finding the fountain of youth and beauty. She has become disgusted with her wrinkly old body. She employs a mad scientist in her basement to conduct brain transplant experiments on stolen corpses from a local cemetery. Three young and beautiful European girls are hired to be the old woman’s servants. The old woman hopes to have her brain transplanted into the head of one of the beautiful girls.
Director Joseph V. Mascelli also worked on Ray Dennis Steckler’s loved cult classic – The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living & Became Mixed Up Zombies, as a cinematographer. Actor Frank Gerstle, who plays the mad scientist Dr. Otto Frank, also starred in two other cult films – The Wasp Woman (1959) and Killers From Space (1953). Gerstle’s voice can be heard as one of the characters in the 1961 cartoon – Calvin & The Colonel.
The Atomic Brain would certainly make a great, fun double feature with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1959) or The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961). Enjoy!
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