518-The Atomic Brain

Film Year:  1963
Genre:  Horror, Science Fiction
Director:  Joseph V. Mascelli
Starring:  Marjorie Eaton, Frank Gerstle, Frank Fowler, Erika Peters, Judy Bamber, Lisa Lang
MST Season:  5
Featured Short:  "What About Juvinille Deliquency?"

The Short

Dated short about an old man getting his hair messed up by a gang, which leads to talk about youth restrictions in the town.  The innocent teens of the high school feel this is unfair and try to plea their case to the town council.  They are asked if they have a solution to this problem.

That shuts them up.  Curfew is put into effect.  The end.

Initially meant as a discussion piece for teenagers about how to hypothetically solve a problem that might not have an easy or ideal solution.  Juvenile delinquency itself is a tricky subject itself because what they’re debating is on the basis of controlling individuals by controlling an entire populace.  It’s not all that different from the gun control debate.

What would I do?  Well I hate teenagers, so the hell with all of them.  Lock them up until they’re 21 unless they’re going to school.  That’ll solve your problem.

The Movie

Initially titled Monstrosity, this unpleasant movie tells of an old woman who longs to be young and beautiful again.  She enlists the help of a mad scientist to transplant her brain into the body of one of three beautiful house servants she has just hired.  And to transplant the brain of her cat into another one because...why wouldn’t we?

This is trash.  This is really all that comes to mind when I watch this movie.  It’s best aspects are an interesting premise and it’s gritty tone, but it’s all for naught.  The minute any character states any form of dialogue this movie just falls apart.  And it falls apart double time if said character has a hilariously bad accent.  The film’s pace is sluggish and without feeling of a direction toward any sort of conclusion.

And my god is it ugly.  This movie is just hard to look at, and not entirely because of direction and cinematography either.  The characters are cruel and hateful, while three innocents are taken in and destroyed by their awfulness.  There’s really one thing in this movie that I think describes it in a nutshell, and that’s the character of Bea.  She is portrayed as the most naive, cheerful, and beautiful of her group, but at one point she gets barely scratched on the face.  This leaves her HORRIBLY DISFIGURED for some reason, and in the climax she dies horribly in a fire as if she was not meant to live anymore, just like all the other non-beautiful people who died during its runtime.  That’s the moral of the story folks, if you’re not beautiful you should die.

The Episode

The crew has a handful with trying to make The Atomic Brain funny.  It’s such a dour, cynical, and just gosh darn unhappy movie.  Sometimes it’s tempting to go with it and go dark with the riffing, but they decide with this particular movie it’s best to counterweight it.  There’s a goofy nature to the riffing in this episode, an almost admirable good-natured spirit that lets this bleak movie know that it’s gonna take more than this to get them down.  They search every nook and cranny of this movie for something to shed some light on its darkness, from odd music choices (“She’s old...she’s old…”) to hilariously bad accents (seriously, that “British” lady earns every riff she receives).  While I don’t quite think it’s enough to save this crazy movie, I really have to give them an A for effort.  There are more laughs than expected, but it’s still a slog to watch this thing.

The highlight is the dated Juvenile Delinquency short, which is just so overbearing with its drama and direction that you can’t help but laugh at the short all by its lonesome.  The cheeseball plot developments, bad acting, and overall bizarre scenarios are taken aim at and they mostly hit a home run.  I personally love the old lady who gets gang members to stop cold in their tracks (prompting one of my favorite riffs of the series “This is my turf now!”).

What About Juvenile Delinquency? was reriffed by Rifftrax many years later.  It definitely paled by comparison.

The host segments are a low key batch of losers mostly.  Weather Servo 9 is the high point, as Servo upgrades himself into a weather sensing device for some reason and enters the vacuum of space.  Not a laugh riot, but funny enough.  Other than that, Magic Voice’s chat with the narrator of the film is a great concept poorly executed and Mike’s chin puppet is pure filler.  The Invention Exchange continues to die a slow painful death, this week instead of an invention the Mads and the Bots just dress up like each other and mock one another.  It’s really not that funny.

The Atomic Brain is pretty much a swing and a miss.  There’s a godawful movie drowning almost strong riffing, a great short, and crappy host segments.  This one just doesn’t quite come together.

Average

The DVD

Rhino released this episode in their Volume 3 collection.  It features good audio and video, however the copy they used features the stinger cut from the episode.  It did feature raw unused take footage as an extra.  Out of all the bonus footage on Volume 3 this is the weakest, probably due to the fact that these host segments just aren't very good.

Shout Factory re-released the episode twice.  The first was on a single disc through their online Shout Select program.  The episode had its stinger restored, but there were no extras.  The second was on their re-release of Volume 3, which featured spotty video but the stinger was also restored.  The bonus footage was also included.