Strange filmmaker Doris Wishman (1912-2002) certainly deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of weird cinema.  The unusual fact that she was a woman filmmaker who worked in both sexploitation and hardcore (the latter featuring the transcendent Annie Sprinkle) would get her in the door here.  But beyond that, ho would have thought not just to make a nudie-cutie movie, but try to make a sci-fi nudie-cutie movie (really, see Nude on the Moon [1961]).  Or not just to cast a voluptuous star, but the cartoonish (as in 73″) Chesty Morgan in not one but two movies.  (Really!  There’s Deadly Weapons [1973] in which Chesty uses her endowment as a means of assassination, and Double Agent 73 [1974], in which she has a camera installed in, well, you can guess where.)

So obviously it’s worth a look-in to see if there’s some mad science in the œuvre of this unequaled cinéaste.  There is, and it’s depicted just above, even if it is a little disappointing.

The Amazing Transplant is the story, told mostly in a curious unravel-the-mystery flashback structure, of one Arthur Barlen, a shy young man who blackmails a surgeon into transplanting his deceased friend Felix’s superior (supposedly, we don’t really get to see) male member onto him.

This little bit of mad-ish science certainly helps Arthur with certain confidence issues.  For one, it gives him the strength to proposition his sort-of girlfriend, a young woman who appears to enjoy sitting around playing the zither in the nude.

Unfortunately young Arthur has to live with a cinematic conceit that goes back at least as far as The Hands of Orlac (1924), which is that along with transplanted organs comes transplanted bits of personality, and it turns out that the late Felix was characterized by a rather specific and powerful fetish which poor Arthur is ill-equipped to handle.  Things do not go well…

It’s probably best to read this movie as a sort of commentary on the fetishistic nature of male sexuality, at least as perceived by Wishman.  It’s also an opportunity to look at some really hideous interior design.  The doctor’s office, for example:

I swear, James Lileks could have put together an entire extra chapter of his book on how truly awful interior decoration was in the 1970s just by taking screenshots from this movie.

The mad science quotient is surprisingly low given the movie’s medical-horror premise.  We get some very simple operation scenes, and little else.

Probably not a hit unless you’re a Doris Wishman completist or really into movies about penises.  Something Weird does offer an edition.

While we’re on the subject of old cinematic mad science that deserves attention, I should bring up The Man Who Changed His Mind, a 1936 feature that starred Boris Karloff, who had recently given a type-creating performance as Frankenstein’s monster and who now gets to be the mad scientist, “Dr. Laurience.”

Providing appeal here is Anna Lee playing Dr. Clare Wyatt, who goes to assist Laurience, believing him to be (mostly correctly) a misunderstood genius.

Laurience, it turns out, has been working with a mind-transfer technology, which he demonstrates to the skeptical Dr. Wyatt through animal testing (unusual prudence for cinematic mad science!) in a well-done mad scientist laboratory scene.

Things spin out of control, as they have a way of doing in the movies.   An ambitious press baron (literally — he is Lord Haselwood) undertakes to finance Laurience’s work, but when Laurience attempts to present his results to the assembled scientific community, he is laughed off the stage.  The furious Lord Haselwood pulls Laurience’s funding, which causes Laurience to throw caution to the winds by testing his mind transfer device on…Haselwood and Laurience’s own crippled assistant Clayton… with success.   It will get worse for the good characters from there on out, because Laurience is falling in love with Dr. Wyatt…who is in turn attached to Lord Haselwood’s journalist son…

I’m slightly surprised that this movie doesn’t have a higher profile than it appears to have.  Karloff gives a strong performance, though perhaps I’m biased toward sympathy with his character (I’ve had my own moments when I realized that professional failure loomed at the same time as I realized that the One You Love Does Not Love You, resulting in a form of inner anguish I wouldn’t wish on the worst person alive).  And Anna Lee is not just eye candy here.  She plays a character who’s a competent and strong-willed scientist in her own right (the opening scene depicts her performing surgery), and obviously there’s appeal there.  (Plus a plot twist that I’ll run under the fold to avoid spoilers…)

Definitely a film to watch, if you want to know the mad science cinematic canon.  It’s available at the Internet Archive and also embedded below:

Personally appealing bit of trivia: The movie was directed by Robert Stevenson, who would have a long, long career that ended with…The Shaggy D.A., which as I recall is the story of a man who finds his mind in the body of a dog.  So I guess history rhymes here…

Additional personally appealing bit of trivia: Anna Lee would have an even longer career and continue acting into her nineties, which I think is awesome.

Bonus plot element below this fold…

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A movie no aficionado of the history  cinematic mad science science should miss is Dwain Esper‘s Maniac (1934).  It’s a movie that will help you just say no to drugs.  Because with movies like this, who would need drugs?

Oh, it starts out sensibly enough as a simple, innocent tale of your standard-issue mad scientist (“Dr. Meirschultz”) who’ has come up with a chemical formula that will resurrect the dead.  Naturally, he and his assistant Don Maxwell will have to break into the local morgue to test the formula.  Happily, Don Maxwell is an unemployed vaudeville performer who specializes in impersonations, so this is not to difficult.

The morgue itself is is a marvelous high-arched space full of ominous darkness.  I suspect this was because Esper didn’t have the production budget to light the set properly, but the effect still works for me.

Meirscchultz’s “victim” (if that’s the right word for a dead person who you are trying to bring back to life) is a carbon monoxide suicide, who looks like she might have had rather a lot to live for (but what do we know of another’s inner sorrows?).

Mad scientist Meirschultz get right to work.

With success!  The victim is revived, sort of, and smuggled back chez Meirschultz to continue her recuperation.

Unfortunately success goes to Dr. Meirschultz’s head, and on his hubris follows nemesis, as it so often does in the mad science movie.  Wishing to continue his experiments, he hands Maxwell a gun and invites Maxwell to shoot himself, so that he can be the next Meirschultz success.  Bad move, Meirschultz.  Maxwell loses his cool and shoots Meirshcultz instead.

Unfortunately Meirschultz is some sort of psychiatrist in addition to being a mad scientist, and when some of Merischultz’s patients show up, Maxwell decides to try impersonating Meirschultz to keep the law away.

This leads to some unfortunate complications when Maxwell gives one of Meirschultz’s already-unstable patients the wrong injection (of “Superadrenaline”), a screwup which generates The One Drug Freakout Scene to Rule them All.  Said patient then abducts the revived dead girl (possibly — the character is played by an entirely different actress).

He runs off into the woods with her and tears off her dress, leading to a rare post-Code example of on-screen nudity.

(El Santo is hilarious on just how gratuitous this scene is.)

And it only gets stranger from there.  Corpses bricked up in cellars, insane neighbors, more utterly gratuitous scenes of young women lounging around in their undies, bogus “educational” inserts…you cannot miss this one.

Fortunately you don’t have to, because it’s available at the Internet archive.

It’s free, so you can’t ask for your money back.

Update 20111224: I realize that the embedding seemed broken for a long time, but I hope it’s fixed now.

[Faustus May 11, 2018: The embedding apparently broke again, but should now be fixed again, and let’s hope it sticks this time.

Continuing for a moment the subject of movies in erotic mad science that don’t really do enough with the concept, I should at least note the existence of (and share a few pictures from, naturally) the 1964 nudie-cutie Kiss Me Quick!, one of the first productions of sexploitation king Harry Novak.

A mad scientist named Dr. Breedlove is conducting experiments on young women in his castle.  The purpose of the experiments is unclear, but has something to do with “perfecting” the young women, who don’t seem to be in much need of perfecting if you ask me, but maybe I’m just not insane enough.  In any event, a very dim alien named Sterilox teleports into Breedlove’s mad-lab with the aim of bringing back with him a “perfect specimen,” for purposes of…manual labor on his homeworld (told you he was dim).  Mostly the movie is, like most nudie-cuties, an excuse for its comely female cast members to wiggle around fetchingly wearing as little as the law and custom of the time would allow.

Still, there is some appeal to the mad-science setting does carry some appeal.  Breedlove has built as sex machine (of course) of which his assistant Kissme is rather fond.   Here, Breedlove admonishes her never to use the sex machine when he is not around:  “You’re going to sex yourself out of the world, one of these days.”

Personally I think this might have been a much more interesting movie had Kissme gone ahead and done exactly that, but I wasn’t around in 1964 to be asked about it.

Aside from pretty girls and lab equipment, there are always Breedlove’s lunatic pronouncements to help carry us through the movie.  A personal favorite:  “Don’t be alarmed girls.  I had you forcefully [sic] abducted and brought here to my castle for your own good.  You’ll see.  Just just continue to do as I’ll say, and I’ll make you like you always dreamed you would be made.”

Really.

So not a complete waste of time for the thaumatophile.  There’s even now a DVD from Something Weird Video in which you can hear commentary from Harry Novak himself.