Best movie of this year hands down!

not as good as all the hype

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

An Exercise In Nonsense

We are introduced to Dr. Frank (Frank Gerstle), who is busy transplanting an animal brain into a human body. It's his favorite hobby. We then meet the dog-man, one of Dr. Frank's experiments gone wrong. The two are out gathering corpses for Dr. Frank's laboratory in the basement of a stately mansion. Frank works for an elderly woman named Mrs. March (Marjorie Eaton), who wants him to plop her brain into the head of a beautiful young woman. Three such women have just arrived, answering an ad to work as "housekeepers" for Mrs. March! They have no idea that the old woman has other plans for one of them. What does that mean for the other two? Of course, they should probably have been instantly suspicious upon arrival, when Mrs. March demanded to see them naked! Just what sort of "housekeeper" is she looking for? Madness, murder, and unholy transplants ensue! MONSTROSITY (aka: THE ATOMIC BRAIN) is hyper-schlock as God intended it to be! EXTRA POINTS FOR: The cat-brained-girl, who hisses, growls, eats mice, and goes up on the roof and won't come down! Perrrrfect...

Marjorie Eaton is Hetty March, an embittered old lady who longs to be youthful again. This granny look-alike ain't carrying around no birdcage with a tweety bird in it and a black and white "putty tat" following her with a knife and fork. She is pure evil, living in an evil looking mansion with an evil looking gate, and is surrounded by an evil looking aging gigolo, an even more evil looking mad doctor, and a very evil looking black cat. Like the legendary Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly drank the blood of young virgins after torturing them in order to keep herself young looking and beautiful, Hetty is determined to find the perfect body to have her brain transfered into so she can live another 70 years and continue to live an evil life until once again she has to find another young body to transfer that old, demented brain of hers into.To say that this is a wonderful piece of camp celluloid is an understatement. It is obvious that Eaton is having a wonderful time being so dastardly, yelling constantly for each of the three foreigners she has hired as "maids" to do her bidding, humiliating the kept man she really has no future use for (after her plans are finalized) and finally barking last minute orders at the doctor as he prepares to strap her into a gurney. The old hag isn't even above murder to make sure her evil plans are accomplished. I thought the choice of the name "Otto Frank" for the doctor, however, to be disrespectful to the memory of his daughter Anne and the famous diary. It would have been simpler and with better taste to simply have chosen another name for this character. At only just over an hour, this seemed more like one of those old fashioned stage melodramas which traveled around community theater barns in the 1930's and 40's, and in the wake of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and subsequent "frightening old lady" horror epics might have worked in a higher budgeted version with someone like Tallulah Bankhead or Judith Anderson as the evil millionairess. The narration of the piece gives us the insinuation that she is just one of many wealthy old people looking for younger bodies to transfer their brains into. That part of it is extremely hokey and dominates much of the narrative, but a twist at the very end is outrageous and left me shaking with laughter. My wish for the ending, however, would be for the old hag in a new body to be accused of murdering herself and the last shot of her (in the new body with the old brain) being strapped into an electric chair with a genuine look of horror (but no atonement) on her face as she realizes her next stop will be the firey pits of Hades.

When a film like Monstrosity is held up for six years before being inflicted on the movie going public you can smell the gravy and cranberry sauce from your movie seats. In that sense Monstrosity does not disappoint.Where it does disappoint is in the fact this thing had the elements of being an incredibly funny satire on Frankenstein like films. Someone like Mel Brooks would have had a field day with the plot premise. A rich old cosmetics queen, someone like Helena Rubinstein, is financing experiments in brain transplantation and electronic conversion of brains to various other organs. The experiments by Frank Gerstle are inter special. You got to love him transplanting the brain of a cat into one of Marjorie Eaton's servant girls.Of course the object is for Eaton's brain to be transplanted into the body of a 20 something beauty queen so she can leave her money to herself. If she can't take it with her, she ain't leaving.In the hands of someone like Peter Lorre as the mad scientist and Phyllis Diller as the aging beauty queen, this could have been monstrously hilarious instead of in itself being one dull monstrosity.

I watch bad movies with my nephew every few months. When I was growing up, you could watch these hideously awful movies on Saturday afternoons or late night. Now you have to buy them, but I digress.This was a wonderfully awful movie. The character, Bea's, accent is worth the admission price alone. At one point, her co-prisoner says, "Oh you shouldn't talk like that." I said, "Yes, because your accent is awful." But the movie itself has a interesting twist at the end, which actually was creative, albeit unbelievable. As someone else said, it's good in a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 way, but if you have someone to watch it with, watch the un-dubbed version. It's soo easy to make fun of yourself. Enjoy!!!