The odd Dr. Ood checks in with the head of his mentor after severing  the head from its diseased body in the 1959 West German film The Head.

The Head, where have you been all my life?

A West German horror film from 1959 recently popped up on one of my streaming services. It’s called The Head, and I almost jumped for joy because I had never heard of it.

Like I said, it’s a West German horror film, which, apparently, is a very rare thing, perhaps because they had lived through the horror of a real-life fascist monster and fictional monsters just couldn’t stand up to Adolf and the fools who fell for his nonsense.

The film was released in the German-speaking world in 1959, and in the U.S. two years later, probably on the drive-in circuit with some equally low-budget exploitation flick.

The story takes up when a new assistant with a weird backstory shows up to work with Dr. Abel, a medical researcher who is famously working on replacing worn out human parts. He has developed “Serum Z” to preserve organs and tissue, which has allowed him to remove and preserve a dog’s head.
The new assistant, Dr. Ood, unloads that he was lost at sea as a child, parents dead, he was given the last name of the ship that went down under his family, the SS Ood.

On first meeting his new boss, Dr. Ood mentions in theory the doctor’s techniques would work on humans, to which the good old doctor calls him crazy, to which Dr. Ood reiterates that he was speaking theoretically.

But he wasn’t, and soon the good doctor’s head has been removed from his body with a diseased heart and is kept alive in a solution of Serum Z.

Wait a minute – where have I heard this before? Oh, yeah, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

I felt a tinge of sadness when I saw that the American The Brain That Wouldn’t Die came out in 1962. For just a moment I thought maybe the makers of the American movie about a severed head in a tray of solution had seen and copied the German movie The Head.

But, no, it must have been something in the air because although The Brain That Wouldn’t Die wasn’t released until 1962 (as a double feature with Invasion of the Star Creatures) it was made in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1959, the same year as the German movie about a head in a bowl of solution.

Weird. Ood, even.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the American movie about a severed head in a bowl of solution, but I think the doctor in that case had promised a new body to his fiance after she was decapitated in a car accident that he caused.  I think there is a locked-away man-beast in the mix as well.

The bodyless woman in the American film is just as disgusted by her situation as Dr. Abel is of his.

“What kind of a monster are you, Ood? You want a freak to show in the circuses? Kill me,” Dr. Abel says when he first awakes and finds he is simply a head.

Ood tells him his brain must be saved for the benefit of mankind.

Dr. Ood, however, isn’t happy with his mentor’s head in a bowl of solution. No, he wants to give the faithful hunchbacked but beautiful nurse Irene a new body in the form of a low-budget, lame-brained stripper that Dr. Ood kindly describes as a dancer.

As soon as the operation is over, Dr. Ood makes a move on his creation. She spurns his advances and runs away to his laughter.

Dr. Ood goes all mad scientist over his “creation.” “You belong to me and me alone.”

Of course, Dr. Ood goes the way of all mad scientists and Irene is free to live her life with the stripper’s body. Dr. Abel gets his wish, too.

From now on I will think of 1959 as the year of the severed head movies.