President Abdul Amir, beloved leader of Kalid, is dying of cancer. His only hope? Dr. Trenton transplanting his brain into a fresh young body so he can continue to rule and his beloved Kalid is not thrown into chaos. On his deathbed, he asks his terrifying bleach-blonde American mistress Tracy to marry him and rule as his queen. She agrees (you just know the traitorous bitch wants the power for herself), and we’re thrown roughly into the credits with some badly placed dramatic music. I bought this movie under the moniker Brain Damage, but its real title is The Undying Brain. For whatever reason, the title was changed, and the resulting title card is an incredibly obvious overlay. Wow, how irrelevant was that?

Amir apparently kicked it during the credits, because now his right-hand men, Muhammad and Dr. Nigserian (what the hell kind of made-up-ass foreign name is that?) are transporting his foil-wrapped (Burt Gummer said it best, “Plastic is not an oxygen barrier) body to the secret laboratory of Dr. Trenton. Amir’s brain is pumped full of fancy formaldehyde that will keep it alive for fourteen odd hours after the body’s death. When they arrive at the lab, they are led to the operating room by Dr. Trenton’s EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! Well, actually his name is Dorro, but I prefer EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! Muhammad blathers about Amir being the greatest leader ever, blah blah, people must not know he was ever dead, blah blah, secrecy of the utmost importance, blah blah. Dr. Trenton assures him that the experiment, although highly illegal (this is, oh, I dunno, Clue #973 that this is a BAD IDEA), is guaranteed a success (Clue #974).

While Dr. Trenton preps Amir’s body for the surgery, a big Sloth-lookin’ dude is chasing a cat-burglar through an alley. Allow me to clarify. When I say Sloth, I’m referring to The Goonies (shudder), not the Brazilian forest animal. Anyway, the cat burglar sneaks into a girl’s apartment to watch her undress. She only gets to shirt off, bra still there before ol’ Sloth makes an appearance. She faints dead away and Sloth chases the burglar out of the apartment and throws him off the roof. While all this is going on, Dr. Trenton and his EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! are beginning the surgery. Call me crazy, but wouldn’t it have been much better planning on Dr. Trenton’s part if he’d had a donor body prepped BEFORE THEY BROUGHT AMIR IN!? QUACK! MALPRACTICE! AGH! If he’s supposed to be the greatest surgeon in the world, people with HMO’s are even more fucked than you think.

When they pull Amir’s brain out of his head and stick it in a bowl, it falls apart. Oops. How the hell are they supposed to transplant this thing after they toss it around like a football and it turns into ground chuck? They stick it in either an Arcturan life-support suit (obscure "Doctor Who" references rule) or a Mi-Go brain cylinder (obscure Lovecraft references rule too), your call, and kick back to wait for Sloth to return with the body. But oh no! The brain needs blood to survive, so Dr. Trenton sends EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! down to the basement where two girls are chained up. He torments them for a bit, then drains a jar full of blood from the weaker of the two to feed Amir’s brain. Those damn towel-heads holding innocent American citizens and tormenting them without reason…oh, wait, that’d be John Ashcroft, wouldn’t it? Those damn Americans holding innocent Ameri…HEY! What the hell!? A bunch of guys wearing Homeland Defense Force badges just broke into my room! They’re accusing me of being an enemy combatant! I’m being hauled awayto ja ilI’llt ry to finis hthiswhenican reachacomputersorryIllbeb ack!

Oh my dear Cthulhu did that ever suck. Do you have any idea what an anal probe performed with a drain snake feels like? Well DO YOU!? *sigh* Sorry. I’m a little edgy, but I’ll do my best to finish this review before I break down. Wow. Anywhen, back to the story. Dr. Trenton impresses the importance of secrecy on Muhammad, and kicks Dr. Nigserian off the project, saying that EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! is more than capable of helping him finish. After Dr. Nigserian and Muhammad leave, Sloth (okay, we find out here his name is Gor, so I can stop calling him that) brings the broken corpse of the burglar in. Dr. Trenton is furious that they can’t use the mangled body, so he decides to use Gor’s body as a temp flesh container until they can find a suitable donor.

Dr. Nigserian and Muhammad are followed leaving the lab, and a mysterious car runs them off the road. Dr. N (hey, I still have two pages of notes to go - would you want to keep typing that stupid name?) escapes, but Muhammad and their guards die a fiery death. If only they had left the damn keys in the ignition and didn’t worry about impressing the girls (obscure driver’s ed jokes rule, right Fedeler?).

Dr. Trenton puts Gor on the slab, and he has a flashback to when he was deformed. Gor (no wonder he’s messed up! Who the hell names their kid Gor!?) is a man of simple tastes, or a simpleton of no taste, take your pick. One day as he is playing in the woods with a toy gun, he stumbles upon some rednecks. They tease him, and the gun is broken. Gor, being twice as big as the bigger of the rednecks, splits the fat one’s face open. The one who bears a striking resemblance to pro-wrestler X-Pac smacks Gor in the head with a shovel and dumps battery acid on his face. Viola, instant monster.

EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! is sad at losing Gor, who was his only friend. How un-PC is that? Midgets are freaks, so of course they don’t have any normal big-people friends. Of course, when your only hobbies are sadistically torturing young women and draining their blood, I can imagine it’s hard to find an understanding pal. Oh well. With your only friend gone, what better way to cheer yourself than torturing the chained women? Off he goes. The more drained of the two dies, so he drags her corpse away, dropping his ring of keys. Katherine sees her chance and escapes. After traipsing through the catacombs under the lab (oh God no! This is Dr. Orloff’s castle, isn’t it? AAAGH! Invisible Dead flashbacks!), she finds the discarded body of Amir.

Dr. N finds Tracy and tells her he suspects foul play. Since it’s impossible that an outsider knows of the operation, it must be someone in their group, and Dr. Trenton is suspecto numero uno. Tracy tries to tell Dr. N that Dr. Trenton is kosher, and it must be someone else.

Meanwhile, Katherine finds a crazy man chained up in the catacombs (AAAAGH! It IS Invisible Dead!), and the assassin driver arranges a meeting with Dorro to receive his payment. Dr. N recognizes him at the phone booth and gives chase, which ends with the assassin jumping into a booby-trapped car and doing the kerflooie waltz. Dr. N is convinced after this that Dr. Trenton is trying to bury Amir. Oh, and Katherine gets bitten by a big nasty spider in the basement. You can always tell when the third act is starting in these movies. There’s always a mad dash to get all the characters to meet, which causes about half an hour’s worth of stuff to get crammed into three minutes. I’m sure my movie-reviewing peers will agree with me that this is always the hardest part to write about, because there’s all this stuff going on, and none of it connects. The first and second acts can always flow smoothly together, so why can they never get the second transition right? Oop, hang on. Someone just handed me a note from off screen. It reads “YOU try making a perfect movie in four days, Mr. Smart-ass.” Indeed.

Dr. N and Tracy arrive at the lab, and Dorro sends them in to see Dr. Trenton. Once they’re inside, Dorro pulls a Leprechaun (or would it be the Leprechaun pulled a Dorro, considering this movie preceded that little gem by about twenty years?) and rips up the engine. Dr. Trenton shows them Amir’s new body just as he’s waking up. Amir, understandably distressed over waking up in the body of a seven-foot imbecile with Play-Doh™ all over his face, smashes up the lab and tries to strangle Trenton. Dorro stops him, and Tracy, obviously in cahoots with Trenton, tries to convince him that Dr. N is the bad guy. Amir escapes with Tracy, and Trenton wakes up in time to subdue Dr. N. EVIL MIDGET HENCHMAN! is sent to dump him in the basement, where he discovers the escape of Katherine. He recaptures her (I guess she wandered in a circle and came right back to the dungeon), but she stabs him with a syringe laying on the ground and he dies. I guess big-people doses of anesthetic are lethal to the wee ones.

Outside, Amir kills some random people on the highway, and Dr. Trenton starts zapping him with his mind-control-radar-migraine machine. Meanwhile, Dr. N wakes up and sucks the poison out of Katherine’s leg (she got bit by that big-ass spider, remember?). They escape the lab, grab some guns from the broken car, and join the chase. Amir sees a little boy with a toy gun and has a relapse to Gor. Uhh…with Amir’s brain in control of the body and Gor’s brain presumably in the garbage can, where are these memories coming from? Was Gor perhaps a throwback to a prehistoric time when man had another brain in his ass?

The boy outruns Gor/Amir and finds Dr. N and Kat. He tells them about the monster and Dr. N goes off looking for him. Amir comes across Kat and the boy and explains to them his situation. He gets another brain zapping from Trenton and runs off. Tracy confronts Dr. Trenton and he tells her that he plans to use the brain zap-o-matic to control Amir and use him as a puppet so he can rule Kalid. Hang on a minute. Why was Tracy acting so strange? She’s obviously not working with the doctor, so why did she want Amir to run away and not try to team up with Dr. N? Did she just want him to die so she could take over as queen and have all his gold, or oil, or goats, or whatever the hell Kalid exported? Ah, fuck it, we’re almost done.

Gor returns to the scene only to be zapped by Trenton, but Dr. N pops up and pulls a gun on him. He rants a bit about how the mind-meld between Amir and Gor is an abortion. Okay, hang on again. Don’t you mean “aberration?” Nope, not going into it. Deep breath for the wrap-up. Ready? Amir offers to share Kalid with Dr. N if he kills Trenton but he shoots Amir instead. He and Tracy both run off. Amir chases Tracy and a rag doll effigy of her falls off a cliff. One down, one to go. Amir catches Dr. N and snaps his neck. Trenton re-transplants Amir’s brain into Dr. N’s body and performs plastic surgery on him to make him look like Amir’s old self.

We return to Kalid for the final scene, where Amir appoints Dr. Trenton the head of their Big-ass Ministry of Science, which will be the largest and most supremely powerful in the world as Dr. Trenton smirks on. So the bad guy wins. There’s just one problem with his plan. Okay, he now has control over a shitty third-world country and all the goats his swollen member can handle. Thing is, just because you show up and say “Okay, we’re now going to have a supreme science ministry and we will be the most powerful country in the world” doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Sure, you could build a couple of underground bio-weapon labs and become sort of a terrorist threat, but chances are a Texan with an F+ in English is going to start shooting missiles at your children before you can do much with them. Ah, well. Let madmen have their dreams. At least he doesn’t have to worry about having sex with Tracy anymore. Ick.

I liked this movie. I like all movies like this. I love the grainy film, I love the acting which is obviously bad, but is somehow still believable, and I love the makeup effects which somehow look just right when you know they shouldn't. Hooray for The Undying Brain, and hooray for Al Adamson (RIP)!