If you’ve ever watched a ‘60s B-movie and thought, “This is amazing, but what if everyone involved knew exactly how ridiculous it is?”, then The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (2020) is pretty much your love language.
Derek Carl’s remake of the 1962 cult oddity doesn’t try to “fix” the original so much as lovingly drag it, like a drunk friend being escorted out of a dive bar at 3 a.m. It’s a near shot-for-shot remake that somehow feels fresher, nastier, and funnier—like the original movie went away, took a media studies degree and a gender theory class, and came back ready to talk.
Also, the brain talks. A lot. And she is pissed.
“I Lost My Body” But Make It Trashy
The plot is unchanged in its beautiful awfulness:
Dr. Bill Cortner (Patrick D. Green) is a talented surgeon with the ethics of a dumpster fire. After a car accident that decapitates his fiancée Jan (Rachael Perrell Fosket), Bill does what any sane, loving partner would do: steals her head, carts it back to his secret lab, and reanimates it on a tray.
Jan wakes up, discovers she is now a furious disembodied head, and unfortunately remains the most reasonable person in the film.
Bill, meanwhile, decides this isn’t a tragedy so much as… a renovation. He’ll just find Jan a new, “better” body. You know, like upgrading a phone. He sets off on a meat-shopping tour of women he deems physically suitable, and the movie goes full satirical throttle on male ego, objectification, and the kind of “nice guy genius” who absolutely should be nowhere near a scalpel.
Jan, stuck in the lab with Bill’s scarred assistant Kurt and a monstrous failed experiment locked in the closet, slowly goes from helpless victim to vengeful chaos engine. If the original movie hinted at that, this remake makes it loud, explicit, and very, very funny.
Jan Compton: Patron Saint of “Absolutely Not”
Rachael Perrell Fosket absolutely anchors the movie as Jan, which is impressive considering she literally does not have a body for 90% of the runtime.
Her performance is this gorgeous cocktail of:
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Genuine horror
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Existential crisis
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Radiant, escalating contempt
Jan is not grateful to be alive. She’s not touched by Bill’s “devotion”. She is horrified, angry, and deeply over this man’s entire personality. And the script leans all the way into that.
She:
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Roasts Bill’s god complex
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Calls out the misogyny and body-obsession baked into his Franken-plan
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Takes control in the only ways she can—through her mind, her voice, and the other horrors Bill has accidentally created
In the original, Jan’s journey from victim to vengeful presence always felt a bit accidental. Here, it’s purposeful. She’s not just a tragic brain-in-a-pan. She’s the moral center of the film, and also the one most likely to burn the world down out of sheer principle.
Honestly, relatable.
Dr. Bill Cortner: Red Flag in a Lab Coat
Patrick D. Green plays Bill as exactly the kind of guy who would say, “Look, I know I cut your head off, but can we at least admit I saved it?”
He’s:
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Smug
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Charming in a deeply unsettling way
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Convinced that his brilliance justifies literally anything
What’s fun about this version is that the film doesn’t try to nuance him. This is a man who:
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Treats women’s bodies like spare parts
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Talks about ethics like they’re a cute suggestion
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Has a secret lab, a monster in the closet, and the self-awareness of wet cardboard
The movie treats Bill like what he is: a horror villain, sure, but also an exaggerated version of every man who thinks his “potential” matters more than anyone else’s agency. He’s not a tragic genius. He’s the walking embodiment of “I can fix her” energy, except in this case, “fix” means “decapitate and repurpose.”
Style: Retro, Sincere, and Just the Right Amount of Stupid
One of the best things about this remake is that it doesn’t try to be slick or modern in the usual horror-remake way. It leans into:
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Retro aesthetics
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Awkward blocking
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Stilted dialogue rhythms
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Slightly off-kilter performances
But instead of feeling incompetent, it feels intentional. The movie is very self-aware, but it never turns into a lazy parody. It’s affectionately recreating the wobbly tone of a ‘60s genre cheapie while adding just enough modern sensibility to make the jokes land and the commentary sharp.
The pacing is still weird. The plotting is still ridiculous. But that’s the point. If you’re watching a movie called The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and expecting rigorous realism… I don’t know what to tell you.
The Women Bill Shops For: Not Just Walking Torsos Anymore
The original film had this long, leering middle stretch where Bill scours bars, clubs, and model agencies in search of a body, and it played like a morbid cheesecake reel.
The remake keeps that structure, but tweaks the tone:
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Doris, Roxanne, Paula, Donna, etc. feel like actual people with lives, not just legs with dialogue.
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Their scenes are still heightened and campy, but you get glimpses of how casually Bill dehumanizes them—and how oblivious he is to it.
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The film has fun stylizing these bits while also poking at the way women’s bodies are picked apart, judged, and measured like produce.
Basically, the movie manages to roast both the original’s male gaze and the real-world culture that created it, all while still giving us go-go-dancer energy and grindhouse framing.
That’s a neat trick: honoring the trash while interrogating it.
The Lab, the Monster, and the Mess
Back in the lab, things are gloriously gross and unhinged:
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Jan’s head on a tray, snarking and scheming
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Kurt, the tragically loyal assistant with his own history of being used and discarded
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The Thing in the closet: a hulking, botched experiment played by Alex Tiefenthaler, all rage and pain
The lab sequences work not just as horror but as metaphor: this is the physical manifestation of Bill’s ego, stitched together from half-baked ideas, human suffering, and things he’d rather keep locked up and unseen.
The final act, when Jan exerts her mental influence and the lab literally tears itself apart, feels like the inevitable result of years of arrogance catching fire. Bodies fall, blood sprays, the Thing goes full revenge, and Jan finally gets the last word.
You know it’s going to end badly. The joy is in watching how badly—and who gets to walk away, in whatever condition.
Satire Wearing a Severed Head as a Hat
What really makes this remake sing is the way it leans into satire without abandoning sincerity.
It’s funny, yes:
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Jan’s dry, furious line delivery
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The absurd seriousness with which Bill explains his monstrous plan
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The overblown noir-ish detective, the sketchy nightlife, the whole pulp universe the film lives in
But under the humor, it’s also clearly interested in:
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How men justify harming women “for their own good”
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The way bodies—especially women’s bodies—are treated like customizable objects
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The fantasy of control versus the reality of consequences
The film doesn’t sermonize. It just lets the sheer awfulness of Bill’s worldview play out to its natural, bloody conclusion. And it rewards the one person who never bought into it: the woman he tried to quite literally disembody and own.
Final Verdict: Long Live the Head
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (2020) is the rare remake that understands exactly what made the original memorable—and then, instead of sanitizing it, leans even harder into the weirdness while updating the politics.
It’s:
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Campy
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Mean in all the right ways
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Weirdly empowering
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And absolutely committed to the bit
If you like your horror:
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Cheap-looking but clever
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Bloody but character-driven
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Feminist but still willing to throw a mad scientist into the metaphorical (and literal) meat grinder
…then this is absolutely worth your time.
Just maybe don’t watch it with anyone who thinks “romantic gesture” includes the phrase, “Don’t worry, babe, I’ll find you a better body.”
