The Atomic Brain

The Atomic Brain isn’t a good movie by any stretch, but it certainly has some charm to it if you ask me. This is an older movie that was dug up by the MST3K bunch, and has gained quite a bit of popularity through the show.

The Atomic Brain is centered around the idea of using brain transplants as a way of prolonging death, which is fodder for some grade A shenanigans as the plot progresses. The mad scientist who is pioneering the process is recruited by a wealthy aging widow (who is hilariously over-the-top evil and cruel) in order to execute a scheme for her to live on in a more youthful body. They invite a number of young women to their mansion under false pretenses, and start a process to select which one will host the old widow’s brain. I don’t completely understand why they needed to go through this final selection process, unless the widow just happens to be highly particular about her host. In any case, things go awry. Animal brains get mixed with human brains on a few occasions to hilarious effect, and ultimately the evil plot fails horribly as the house burns to the ground.

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit more than I thought I would. I loved how horrible the old widow was throughout the film, and how cheesy all of the human/animal hybrid experiments wound up. The leads weren’t particularly enthralling or interesting, but a lot of the peripheral action and characters were entertaining and ridiculous enough to make the movie a pretty decent watch (as far as bad movies go). I think this movie’s MST3K riff is golden as well, and adds a lot of entertainment value to the movie. I believe that this is one of the handful of MST3K episodes available on Netflix, so I can definitely recommend checking it out there.