There’s a line in Carl Reiner’s 1983 horror-comedy The Man With Two Brains that says very little about brain science, but probably quite a lot about the people who make sci-fi brain movies: “I don’t know if I was interested so much in the science as I was in the slime that goes along with it. Snakes and frogs. When I saw how slimy the human brain was, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”
Slime is a big part of the horror genre. Blood and guts and goop abound in both the best and worst of the genre. What I like best about The Man With Two Brains is its undeniable fascination with the films that get very little respect. Sci-fi films with shaky morality and even shakier facts like Donovan’s Brain and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die are absurd mad science tales in which doctors are driven to unspeakable, regrettable acts by their desire to push the boundaries of human knowledge and, especially in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, the boundaries of their gross libidos.
Though they are rarely screened now, Donovan’s Brain and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die were frequent TV staples for many years before The Man With Two Brains came out, and they would have likely been at least passingly familiar to genre fans in the early 1980s. The first film is about a scientist who’s being psychically controlled by a disembodied brain, the second is about a scientist whose wife is decapitated in a car accident and kept alive in a lab. So he goes out to sleazy bars and tries to find a sexy body to attach to his wife’s head, which loudly and frequently declares it would rather just die.
Carl Reiner’s The Man With Two Brains combines elements of these films, and others, in a madcap farce that does for 1950s sci-fi/horror what Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid did for film noir. The director doesn’t recreate the visual aesthetic of the era – which may perhaps be interpreted as a critique of that era’s b-movie trappings, i.e. maybe it wasn’t worth the trouble – but he’s eager to pick apart how they deconstructed the male psyche, how ludicrous their plots were, and how entertaining it would be to take them one step further, and watch a mad scientist make out with a human brain (it’s okay, it’s wearing wax lips).
Steve Martin stars as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (it sounds just like it’s spelled), a brilliant brain surgeon who, while giving an interview about his own amazing greatness, runs into a beautiful woman named Dolores Benedict with his car. She’s played by Kathleen Turner, whose sultry turn was so iconic in her first film, Body Heat, that she’s already satirizing it in her second, The Man With Two Brains. Dolores was literally just in the middle of killing her rich, elderly husband when Dr. Hfuhruhurr came along, and now that she needs brain surgery, our protagonist is the only person who can save her.
Using his new “cranial screw-top” brain surgery method, Dr. Hfuhruhurr saves Dolores, who promptly seduces him into marrying her. The only problem, besides the fact that Dolores is cartoonishly evil and absurdly unfaithful, is that they’ve been married for six weeks and they still haven’t had sex. Dr. Hfuhruhurr is literally running up the walls with frustration, so they travel to Austria in order to get away from it all, and have a romantic honeymoon.
Granted, it takes a while for The Man With Two Brains to get to the “two brains” part. To be precise it takes over 40 minutes, nearly half the movie’s running time. But Reiner, along with co-writers Steve Martin and George Gipe, isn’t spinning his wheels. The jokes in The Man With Two Brains fly by nearly as fast as a Naked Gun movie, with a reckless disregard for whether the audience can actually keep track of them all. Watching it today at home is probably the best option, because you can pause the scene and revisit all the witty dialogue you missed because you were laughing so hard.
In Austria, Dr. Hfuhruhurr meets Dr. Necessiter, a scientist who’s perfecting a method to keep human brains alive in jars. His laboratory is full of the victims of “The Elevator Killer,” who has been striking in local hotels, and whose crimes are filmed with an extra emphasis on their black-gloved hands. Reiner doesn’t seem terribly interested in lampooning the giallo genre but he seems to have watched at least a few of them, and the resolution to the serial killer subplot – which would be criminal to reveal to the uninitiated – is one of the movie’s many highlights.
Dr. Hfuhruhurr is surprised to discover that he has a psychic link with one of Dr. Necessiter’s brains, that of a woman named Anne Uumellmahaye (it sounds just like it’s spelled), voiced by an uncredited Sissy Spacek, and he quickly absconds with her jar and flees to the country. Although his marriage to Dolores is on the rocks – Hfuhruhurr already tried declaring a “citizen’s divorce” – she’s sticking with him because, unbeknownst to Hfuhruhurr, he’s just inherited $15 million.
Dolores may have his body but only Anne Uumellmahaye has his heart, and soon Dolores is getting jealous of all the attention her husband is giving a disembodied brain, so she tries to cook Anne in an oven. And when that fails she decides to flat out murder Dr. Hfuhruhurr, just at the same time that Dr. Hfuhruhurr – in an attempt to save Anne’s life, since it turns out she’s dying (again) – decides to kill another woman in order to give his true love a body.
By the final act of The Man With Two Brains, Steve Martin has been reduced to a growling maniac, perusing the sex workers of Austria with the discerning eye of a man on the hunt for the perfect used car. The irony that he’s finally, for the first time, only in love with someone for their mind, but he’s exclusively searching for the sexiest body he can find is not lost on Reiner, whose film concludes with a subversive twist that is, frankly, a cheap gag that punches downwards, and falls completely flat.
The Man With Two Brains is such a playful, silly film that it’s extremely jarring to find there are a handful of twisted, genuinely unpleasant jokes scattered throughout the script. Jeffrey Combs, just a few years before he too would descend into mad science in the cult classic Re-Animator, has a small role as a surgeon who does something to Dolores while she’s unconscious that is clearly supposed to be funny, and which is clearly not. There’s also a scene where Dolores finally reveals how evil she is to Dr. Hfuhruhurr and, in the process, she briefly unleashes a torrent of seemingly randomized racial epithets. It’s supposed to make her look bad, and it does, but it’s in very poor taste, not to mention unbelievably jarring. And the ending has about as much good-natured commentary about body issues as Shallow Hal; which is to say, not even remotely as much as it thinks it does.
But the majority of Reiner’s film is a comic delight, seemingly unfettered by common sense or conventional formula. By infusing the mad science horror genre with femme fatale suspense thrillers and serial killer riffs, The Man With Two Brains is able to stay surprising and silly in even the most bizarre situations. Heck, there’s even a twinge of the supernatural. When Dr. Hfuhruhurr asks his dead wife to give him a sign if he shouldn’t marry Dolores, her portrait spins around rapidly, the walls crack behind it, and her ghost screams “NOOOOO! NOOOOO!” (Alas, it was too subtle a hint.)
So pour one out for films like The Man With Two Brains, a mercilessly funny and knowing satire of a genre that almost completely went out of style. As a child I watched Reiner’s film with very little knowledge of the horror genres it was lampooning, and I appreciated it only as bizarre, goofball nonsense. It’s much easier to appreciate Reiner’s comedy classic with a working knowledge of its origins, a genre based on the sad observation that mankind’s scientific progress is limited by man’s ego, urges, and frailties.
“You are playing god!” is what a detective tells Dr. Hfuhruhurr as he tries to put Anne Uumellmahaye’s mind in another woman’s body, and the good doctor sums it up nicely with his knee-jerk response.
“Somebody has to!”