Brain Of Blood

Headcase Hostages

Brain Of Blood
USA 1971
Directed by Al Adamson
Hemisphere/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Story spoilers, as if you’re really concerned
about those things on an Al Adamson movie.

Out of all the Al Adamson movies I’ve explored, as I slowly make my way through Severin’s outstanding Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed edition, Brain Of Blood is probably the dullest and least interesting of the titles I’ve watched so far. It’s also a duplicate, because the film was also included in Severin’s very welcome Hemisphere Horrors boxed set, which I hadn’t got around to watching yet. Actually, this is something Severin have done a couple of times now because their upcoming boxed behemoth, The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee, also has a film which they premiered in their Hemisphere Horrors set, albeit the later release has gone from a 2K scan to a 4K scan (not sure what that means really but I assume that just means it’s better quality).

So, yeah, while I’ve seen some halfway decent/good Adamson films so far and, of course, some truly awful ones... Brain Of Blood just seems a bit of a non-entity in terms of... I just wasn’t bothered one way or another about it. It’s just a bit ‘meh’... which in this case I’ll use as an acronym for ‘Merely Egregiously Humdrum’. And it really shouldn’t be because the plot of the film is really quite staggeringly silly and executed in a ridiculously bad manner. Both these elements coming together should mean for a mockingly enjoyable time but, apart from the whole rat thing (I’ll get to it), I couldn’t really muster up any enthusiasm for this one.

This one starts off in the far away, fictional land of Kalid, as the ruler of the country lays dying. He promises Adamson regular Regina Carrol that she will rule his land at his side, once he has undergone a serious operation which she and Dr. Bob Nigserian (played by Grant Williams) have arranged in America to save his life. So Dr. Bob and friend Mohammed (played by Zandor Vorkov, who played Count Dracula in Adamson’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which is in this set but which I already reviewed in an earlier DVD incarnation here) go to the US to seek out brain specialist Dr. Lloyd Trenton (played by Kent Taylor) and his assistant Dorro (played by Angelo Rossitto), to perform the operation to transplant the leader’s brain into another body and then use plastic surgery on said body so that the people of his country are none the wiser about their ruler’s death.

Okay, so something that you need to know here is that the operation can’t be completed until the leader of Kalid has died. However, leading up to his death he has been treated with a special serum to help keep his brain alive after death, otherwise the operation can’t be performed. So let me just run that one past you again for the sake of clarity... the guy has to have died but his brain must be alive. What the heck? What are they saying here? This already makes no sense. Just anaesthetise him and cut it out while he's alive already!

Okay, so when they get to the US, after helping Trenton remove the leader’s brain and placing it in handy storage (with wires poking out of it, to preserve it for a bit), Bob and the others are sent on their way... to be taken out by an assassin hired by Trenton, who is secretly working with Regina Carrol’s character, to put the leader’s brain into someone’s head and rule the country with him. Wait... wasn’t that the plan all along anyway... why all this killing? Anyway, the only survivor of the assassination attempt is Bob, who chases the assassin later but can’t get to him before the assassin is blown up in his car by Dorro. Meanwhile, the body donor is a bit beaten up, so Dr. Trenton puts the brain into the former body of his ‘disfigured by acid’, simpleton, strong, giant pal Gore.

When Bob finds out, the chase is on as Gore’s personality somehow also resurfaces every now and again, even though his brain has been disposed off. Bob is knocked unconscious in the same dungeon that Dr. Trenton keeps his blood donors in. His blood donors being chained up girls including the lovely and tragically wasted actress who was an Adamson regular at the time, Vicki Volante. Finding herself, of course, in an identical situation and for the same diabolical reason, as her earlier character in Al Adamson’s Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here). Actually, the drawn out scenes where Vicki Volante has escaped her shackles and is wandering around the underground, dungeon chambers is almost atmospheric and, although still pretty dull, I find Volante’s face fascinating (she should have been snapped up by Hollywood to become a major star rather than retire early, methinks) and this is probably the most watchable part of the movie for me. Then there’s the rats...

So although all the human occupants of the dungeon are raggedy and dirty, there are two pretty clean looking rats. When Dr. Bob finds himself in the dungeon with Vicki’s character Katherine, she tells him she’s been bitten on the leg by a rat. Being a good doctor, Dr. Bob then decides to slit open her leg with his handy penknife, where she’s apparently been bitten... and suck out the venom, before bandaging her up. Wait, what? Hold the phone. Isn’t that what you do with a snake bite? Since when are rats venomous. Okay, so she might get rabies but, poisoned? I reckon the good doctor just wanted to suck her leg and I can’t blame him but, still, this is getting ridiculously surreal now (well, more surreal than transplanting people’s brains, anyway).

Almost instantaneously, Vicki becomes the doctor’s love interest but escapes with a stray, random young boy who lives in the general area and stumbles onto the brain monster guy. I don’t know why she keeps the boy because, surely this kid has his own mother to go home to. Anyway, she goes off and there’s a chase where both good guy Dr. Bob and also Regina Carrol get killed. Then Bob’s body is used to rehouse Kalid’s leader and he has plastic surgery to ensure he looks like exactly the same actor who played him in his original body (aged skin as well, which is quite ludicrous considering the reason for the surgery in the first place, now I come to think of it)... ruling Kalid with the evil Doctor as his new head of Scientific Research for the country.

It’s a bleak ending but I couldn’t care less by the time I’d reached this point. Brain Of Blood is, so far, my least favourite inclusion in this quite thorough set and I can’t, in all good consceience, recommend it to anyone. I can, however, recommend Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection in general because it really is a stupendous presentation and I am learning so much about how you recut and re-market films for different audiences from it. So... onward I go.