The Madmen of Mandoras (1963)

A very low-budget science fiction thriller...too bad to be true; well you know what I mean. Also known as THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN. A bit confusing for not being rocket science. Nations are in fear of a deadly poison called "G Gas". Only one person on earth has an antidote and that is Professor John Coleman(John Holland), who has been kidnapped and taken to Mandaros(a fictional South American country). Zealous Nazi officials at the end of WWII removed the living head of Adolf Hitler and relocated in Mandaros in hopes of resurrecting the Third Reich. The surviving German madmen have the idea that Professor Coleman can keep Hitler's brain alive in order to proceed in the attempt of conquering the world. This 64 minute film is directed by David Bradley and the cast includes: Walter Stocker, Marshall Reed, Audrey Caire, Dani Lynn, Carlos Rivas and Bill Freed as Hitler's head.

I do have the Starlite mega box containing a few grindhouse classics. By opening the DVD box containing this flick I saw that there were 2 versions available. One from 1963 called The Madmen Of Mandoras clocking in at 74 minutes and another one called They Saved Hitler's Brain made in 1968 and clocking in at 91 minutes.But what's the difference? being a hit at the drive-ins and grindhouses somebody decided to make a TV worthy. 74 minutes can't be seen on television as a full feature so they added some new shots. But it went even further. They used amateurs to make the new footage and did it on a zero budget. it shows in so many ways. Clothes and hair didn't fit in into the older version and everybody added in the new footage had to die or disappear because they didn't fit into the original one. I saw that the first 13 minutes was new and had nothing to do with the original flick. Then they picked in with the older version and recut it still in the next minutes with new shots. It just didn't work at all. Because as I said earlier, nothing looks the same, everything was wrongly done. Still, it's really a turkey with a goofy head in a jar from Hitler. I only saw one effect worth seeing and that's the burning of Hitler's head. Overall there's much talking going on and nothing really happens. They also used news footage from WOII when they are narrating what and who Hitler was. Also strange is the use of a real footage of an elephant dying on so called nerve gas. I can only say that it looks like an Ed Wood flick but still it do has a few moments you will never forget due being a turkey.Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 0,5/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Let's get the confusing history of this film at least somewhat straight.Released in 1963 as Madmen of Mandoras, this film played drive-ins and grindhouses. I highly doubt they used the superior title of THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN in 1963. This was a true B-movie with a running time of 74 minutes.Move to around 1971 or 1972. Somebody (perhaps the film's producers) felt the movie had to be a little longer to sell it to television.They lopped off the first ten minutes. 25 minutes of new footage was filmed...(including shots stolen from THUNDER ROAD), making it 92 minutes long, and the title was changed to THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN.The New footage was filmed by "Paragon Productions" (the credits say so) using uncredited amateur actors. The film's original credits are shown, except for the new title, one shot crediting Paragon Productions for "additional post production," and another crediting "additional music". This music is only heard over the new footage and consists solely of annoying, tuneless tinkling on some sort of keyboard.Whoever did the new footage in 1972 (best guess based on hair styles and clothing, but certainly later than the mid-60's, as some stated) tried to integrate their footage into the old, but this was a fool's errand. If the 1963 feature was low budget, this new footage had zero budget seemingly.In spite of the difficulty of the task, they didn't even come close to having the resources to pull it off. And they did a bad job in any case. Everybody's hair is just too long. They couldn't afford a hair cut for the actors? A scene shot at "CID Headquarters" has a photo of Eisenhower on the wall, which should have been Kennedy. They went to the trouble of renting the appropriate year vehicles, but they couldn't dig up vintage clothing which was only 10 years old? Another problem is the music in the original. This was stock library music, probably recorded decades prior to the filming.This gives the film a sort of late '40's Poverty Row feel. Almost all the men are wearing hats, adding to the 1940's vibe. This makes it even harder to match up footage. It also doesn't help that the 1972 people are awful actors. I believe I read a rumor once that they were UCLA film students who worked for nothing. All the males have these giant 70's mustaches that make them look like unemployed porno actors.Having gone deep into the flawed history of the film, I'd like to now hail the recent release (in BCI's Starlite Drive-In Theater series) of the original MADMEN OF MANDORAS, taken from the original negative! Now the curious can easily see the original film in pristine quality, after several years of having to suffer with the DVD of the inferior THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN.No distracting 25 minute prologue from 1972 on offer here. We head right into the 1963 footage. We meet the hero, Phil Day, within the first scene, and follow him throughout the confusing plot, instead of meeting him at the 25 minute mark, after all the 1972 people are killed off.Phil is with the "CID", (CIA), and is married to the daughter of Professor Coleman. The Professor is the only person on Earth who has an antidote for "G Gas," a deadly poison that could wipe out entire populations with a few small canisters.In short order, the Professor's daughter is kidnapped (not Phil's wife, another daughter...so, Phil's sister-in-law, I guess) and Phil and his wife K.C. are kidnapped by a desperate man with a gun. He is shot by the bad guys soon enough and Phil leaves him propped in a phone booth, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S style!Before you can say "cheap stereotypes," Phil and the wife are off to the sleepy Caribbean island nation of Mandoras, where plenty of B-movie actors with phony accents are ready to act out every cliché seen in a B-movie depicting Latin America since the film industry began. We get the sweaty chief of police who is not all he seems, his sluggish lieutenant, the café filled with mariachi band AND flamenco dancer, and the "El Presidente" dictator of the island.By the time we finally get to see Hitler's head floating in a jar and goggling its eyes (not brain, entire head, which can even speak primitively -- I guess THEY SAVED HITLER'S HEAD would not have been quite as good of a title), we have no alternative but to laugh at the goofy machinations of the utterly over-the-top plot, dialog and directing. There's no way to take any of this seriously, so your only option is to just sit back and get caught up in the insanity.The film's climax comes with another favorite zero budget film gambit: a trip to Bronson Canyon! This is where a plane carrying "German generals" will land. They will take Hitler's head, restoring it to its place as leader of a decimated world, as soon as the canisters of G-Gas located all over the world are released at the stroke of midnight (nice touch), killing 99% of the world's population. But not if our heroes, Phil, his perky wife, her slutty sister, the blustery professor (they were all reunited during the course of the film) and the plucky natives of Mandoras, can help it! Quick, hide in the caves from Robot Monster and throw hand grenades at the evil Nazis! This is all so irredeemably silly and ridiculous that I don't understand how anyone cannot love this as a piece of cuckoo-bananas entertainment. If you love Ed Wood films, this baby should be on your list, but MAKE SURE you get MADMEN OF MANDORAS, not the highly inferior THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN. (The only improvement in that version was the title change.) Give in to the MADMEN OF MANDORAS!

The version of this film usually seen had some additional footage, shot about 5 years after the original, added to it. And, in addition, it seems to have earlier had some wrapping of this sort. It looks, in other words, like a film within a film within a film. Each wrapping made things worse, and the original was remarkably bad. But I must say that some of the lighting effects in the original are quite cool.