FROM 'MADMAN OF MANDORAS' TO 'THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN'

The Madman of Mandoras Years: 1963 into Hitler's Brain: 1968

Well someone out there knew the title THEY SAVED SATAN'S BRAIN, a television movie in 1968, sounded much more campy and nafarious and downright awesome than the 1963 vehicle where most of the scenes were lifted, THE MADMEN OF MANDORAS...

And the real shame is our first two heroes, tacked-on from the latter sixties and resembling that loose, shaggy, counter-culture era compared to the earlier clean-cut handsome/beautiful hero inspired by Eisenhower scientists from the early sixties, are fun to watch as porn-jazz music plays in the background, resulting in a banal argument about male chauvinism where eventually, the two polar opposites not only get along, but seem to have a future... in the story itself...

Hitler Camp Score: ***

But these deliciously awful characters don't last long, and soon we have a handful of dashing leading men (of all ages and races) and two lovely ladies including Audrey Caire, who would manage to steal an incredible scene from Peter Boyle, as Dennis Patrick's classy wife, in the counter-culture classic JOE a decade later... after the 1963 movie, that is, wherein HITLER'S BRAIN was derived and reconstructed.

A tinge of cold war espionage mixed with a shadowy noir pulse and a lot of running around, from America to South America, all leads to a desert compound where the title literally means everything: once you see Adolf Hitler's scowling head reanimated within a glass structure, moved from location to location, including the back of a car, the patchwork-editing from both the original film and the latter TV rendition means very little: as if the entire meshed project were constructed just to see the Furor's noggin on a platter, epitomizing the cult genre aesthetic. It's too bad those two initial bad-acting hippies (the male resembling future makeup artist Tom Savini) couldn't be the ones who carry the picture through, being much more gloriously Drive-In Awful than the original film's B-movie cookie-cutter heroes. CONNECTION: For a review of another film where an older, more serious spy movie is intermixed later on with hippies, click this link for HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS originally titled THE FAKERS. 

This image alone makes THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN a cult classic

The difference of a few years here's Dani Lynn in the 1968 added They Saved Hitler's Brain

Compared to the 1963 The Madman of Mandoras with Walter Stocker and Audrey Caire

The Madman of Mandoras with Walter Stocker and Audrey Caire

Audrey Caire a decade later as Dennis Patrick's classy wife in JOE starring Peter Boyle