Brain of Blood

Dir. Al Adamson

86 Minutes

USA

1971

Starring: Kent Taylor, Grant Williams, Reed Hafley, Regina Carrol, Vicki Volante, Angelo Rossitto

**/*****

Despite several monetary successes, Kane W. Lynn's Hemisphere Productions, often shooting in the Philippines, was struggling to keep afloat, a distress that led producer Sam Sherman to ask pal and colleague Al Adamson if they could help him out with a cheaply made color horror picture that matches the style of the other films in their "Blood Island" series. The result, shot in eight days, is Brain of Blood. Based on an idea by Sherman, the film begins with Amir, the ruler of Kalid, near death and the future rule of his country hanging in limbo. After passing, his body is quickly flown to the United States where Dr. Lloyd Trenton (Kent Taylor) plans to transplant Amir's brain into a new body. However, his disfigured assistant Gor (John Bloom) is unable to acquire a new body, so Trenton uses its body for the task. 

The film is an interesting twist on the Frankenstein concepts with the scientific catalyst being focused on prolonging life rather than creating it outright. Considering the limitations and the need for a hasty product, the film has an "all-hands-on-deck" appearance not dissimilar to Adamson's usual resourcefulness in reusing footage or his assembly of a small sort-of stock company, both cast and crew often working interchangeably for whatever needs to be completed at that moment (with a strange subplot that allows him to utilize Vicki Volante as a woman trapped in Trenton's basement dungeon, and Angelo Rossitto (most notably of Tod Browning's Freaks fame!) who is torturing her). And it has just enough tantalizing content for its purposes: extended surgical gore, the giant Gor's make-up disfigurement, a creepy dwarf (with Rossitto operating at an insane level of commitment), and many many chase sequences, both on foot and in car (Adamson happily including his favorite effect of a car diving off a cliff before exploding). One can easily see that the film is light on idea to sustain a ninety minutes, with Adamson extending many scenes well beyond their organic shelf life in an effort to make it an acceptable feature length (the initial brain transplant surgery is an endless series of flesh being cut open, blood seeping out, and body parts glamoured in beautiful close-ups), and, as with many of these pictures, hearing the story of its assembly is as, if not more, entertaining than the exploitative pleasures within the films themselves. The narrative itself clearly does not have enough ammo in its arsenal to sustain much artistic interest past a certain point, but its seedier aspects allow for a continuous amount of crafty entertainment, a work that is obviously the product of a need for content with every minute of the production thinking about what audiences will enjoy and, more importantly and challenging, what will inspire them to put down some money to watch.

Viewed on August 5th, 2020

Part of the ongoing Al Adamson Project.