This is "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" meets "House of Frankenstein". Mad doctor Frank seeks out sane doctor Simon, who has discovered a serum that keeps disembodied organs alive. Sane doctor Simon has a bad ticker that is ready to go, an attractive but crippled nurse Kernke, and we all know where this is going. Frank has no apparent motivation for his behavior other than he can do head transplants or keep disembodied heads alive and he's crazy. Desperate attempts were made to give this flick some atmosphere like eerie music and misty night shots but nothing works. Frank is good as the mad doctor and Kernke is attractive but the story is a bore. This was challenging to stay awake through the entire movie.

Horst Frank of Dario Argento's Cat of Nine Tails and other Italian movies appears here on his native soil, and lo and behold it's another film about a head being kept alive by a mad scientist (how many of these films are there?).In The Head, Horst is a mad scientist going off to work with a slightly less mad scientist who successfully managed to keep a dog's head alive for four hours after detaching it, for some reason. Horst is all like "Say- why don't we try that on a human" which gets him some stares from the other mad scientists he's working with (it's a rather overcrowded market in this film). Horst, with his creepy stares and menacing eyebrows, is not to be deterred and don't you know finally gets his wish after the less mad scientist has a heart attack (he also has to kill another mad scientist for getting in his way). Now Horst is ambitious fella to say the least, and set his sights on fixing this nun with a bad back. All he needs is a body donor, and wouldn't you know there's an exotic dancer working round the corner who draws his attention… The Head is an okay film but if you seen The Brain that Wouldn't Die then you've seen a much better (and gorier) film. I know this one was made back in the fifties but what annoys me is that it's just telling the same story without adding any panache. Horst's okay but he's not given much to go on here.

Before Re-animator (1985), before The Thing With Two Heads (1972) and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971), and even before The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), there was The Head, a tawdry low-budget German sci-fi/horror in which mad scientist Dr.Ood (Horst Frank) keeps the decapitated head of his mentor Professor Dr. Abel (Michel Simon) alive on a trolley and stitches the beautiful noggin of hunchbacked nun Irene Sander (Karin Kernke) onto the body of skeezy stripper Lilly (Christiane Maybach).It's delightfully lurid nonsense, packed with scenes of cheap titillation (although my print seemed to have been clumsily shorn of some possible nudity) and macabre madness, none of which will seem in the slightest bit shocking these days, but which do possess an endearing charm that fans of schlock horror will positively lap up. Ood, in particular, is a wonderfully memorable character, the deviant doctor not averse to making moves on his patchwork patient as soon as she comes round from her op—mind you, with the head (and brain) of a beautiful yet innocent nun and the body of a hot bimbo, who can blame him?6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

No, this isn't the psychedelic Monkees movie from 1968; that one's just called "Head." Rather, "The Head" is a West German horror production from 1959--and a very good one, as it turns out--that tells a freaky story of a wholly different kind. As "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film" so astutely reminds us, the film was released in the same year as the similarly themed American film "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," and is just as way-out an experience. In it, Michel Simon--French star of such classic '30s films as "La Chienne," "Boudu Saved From Drowning" and "L'Atalante"--plays a scientist, Dr. Abel, who has devised something called Serum Z, which will allow human and animal tissue to survive independently of their donors' bodies, thus making possible organ transplants and other innovations (this, eight years before the first actual successful heart transplant on Louis Washkansky in 1967). When his new assistant, Dr. Ood, attempts to transplant the healthy heart of a recently deceased hobo into Abel's failing body, the operation goes badly. Good thing that Ood can then decapitate Abel's titular noggin and keep it alive and healthy with the new wonder serum! And as if that weren't enough for one film, Ood--wonderfully played by Horst Frank--soon decides to operate on his pretty hunchbacked nurse, and attach her head onto the hottie body of a local stripper! Holy mix and match!Anyway, "The Head" is a surprisingly interesting and involving film. It features better than adequate acting (Karen Kernke as Irene the hunchback and Christiane Maybach as the obnoxious stripper are both memorable), especially by Frank as the insane, ultimately pathetic and moon-raving Ood (Dr. Odd would be more like it!). Writer/director Victor Trivas brings in his film with a good deal of seedy style, and the look of the picture, with its Expressionistic sets, is often startling. Indeed, I was not surprised to learn that the set decorator here was Hermann Warm, who had earlier worked on such classic films as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and "Vampyr." Although my "Psychotronic" bible maintains that the FX are "pathetic" here, I must respectfully disagree. Actually, the sight of Simon's homely noggin, resting in a dish and connected to wires and bubbling chemical tanks, is most impressive. Throw in some moody B&W photography and a musical score by Willy Mattes and Jacque Lasry that sounds like the "Space" segment of a Grateful Dead concert and you've got quite a striking little film indeed. Even this typically crummy-looking DVD from those indolent underachievers at Alpha Video cannot ruin this experience.