Madmen of Mandoras, The (1963)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
They Saved Hitler's Brain (1972)
* (out of 4)
A deadly nerve gas is causing fear in the states but thankfully a Professor knows how to make the gas useless. The only problem is that crazy guys kidnap him and take him to a secret location where they are keeping Hitler's head alive. Hitler, being the nut he is, wants to use the gas to take over the world. Making a horror movie with Hitler's head coming back to life seems like it would make for some great fun but that's not the case with this turkey as it's pretty dry from start to finish without any redeeming factors. The biggest problem is that the screenplay is so poorly written that it really doesn't know how to exploit the subject matter. Instead of fun things happening we get a tiresome adventure story as our heroes must save the Professor and eventually destroy Hitler once and for all. The performances are all rather bland and that includes the man playing Hitler. Hitler's "screaming" and ranting are rather silly and comes off very stupid. What really doesn't make sense is that we've got a very silly story yet the director treats everything so serious as if we were watching some sort of documentary on actual events.
Nine or ten years later Crown International were starting to release their films to television but this one didn't run long enough so they went back and took out ten minutes worth of footage only to add twenty-five more minutes and the end result was They Saved Hitler's Brain. This features the same story as the previous film with the exception of the "new scenes", which involve two government agents trying to find out if the Professor is safe or not. Needless to say, with an original movie as bad as Madmen was, you really don't need to add extra running time. This movie here is just as worse due to the longer running time and all the added scenes do nothing to improve the film. The only good thing about this film is its outrageous title but then again that really doesn't make the movie any better.
