The Madmen of Mandoras (1963)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Just what I expected

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

A neurobiologist who has developed an anti-dote to a deadly virus is kidnapped and taken to a small Latin American nation called Mandoras. It turns out that this is all linked to Nazis who have managed to keep Adolf Hitler's disembodied head alive in a jar, from here the Fuhrer barks out orders as he attempts to resurrect the Third Reich.I realised quite early on as I watched Madmen of Mandoras that this had to be the early prototype for a movie I had previously seen, namely They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968). It turns out that this earlier version had been released briefly in 1963 and was turned into a movie fit for TV five years later. In order to achieve this, additional material was added to pad out the running time to a more acceptable ninety minutes. Unfortunately, this extra footage was filmed by amateurs and looked very much like what it was, i.e. people from 1968 interspersed into a story filmed several years earlier. It was also, of course, re-titled with the more entertaining, yet major plot point revealing, new name.From memory, there is really not a great deal of significant difference between both versions but Madmen of Mandoras is certainly the better. For one thing, it's shorter and for a film as decidedly ropey as this one, that is a clear blessing. It's also purer in the sense that it doesn't contain pointless extra newer footage whose only purpose is to add more minutes to the run-time. In truth Madmen of Mandoras is a semi-passable b-movie in most respects. Although it really should have been far schlockier given its premise, unfortunately in the main it is uninspired adventure type fare that's on offer here. At the end of the day, Hitler's head is the real star of the show in this one. It's not often you really get to say that sentence, in fact I'm pretty sure this must be the only scenario where that specific point can be made. Even the demise of the head is a highlight, where it melts while engulfed by flames in a sequence that really is rather well done all things considered. All-in-all, this one is okay but should have been better given the potential of it's decidedly psychotronic central idea. If you really have to see a Nazis/mad scientists on a tropical locale film, then I would suggest the more entertaining She Demons (1958) as the way to go.

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.

Originally titled Madmen of Mandoras, this was supposed to be a political paranoid thriller along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, with a respectable budget and moody wide-screen cinematography, but halfway through principal filming in 1963 it was shut down and shelved. Somehow this film and one of its supporting actors ended up in a nameless cheapie studio in 1973, and got completed with grainy, shaky, cropped photography, a cast wearing shag hair and mini skirts and driving groovy convertibles, and cheap electric-piano and twitchy-guitar cop-show music that tries to sound like Shaft or Dirty Harry, all anachronistic and mismatched to the already-then outdated original. This film then, with the copyright date and credits of 1963, and a running time of barely one hour, went straight to sindicated TV release in the late 1970's as They Saved Hitler's Brain. This is an obvious chop-shop job. The original project's sheer preposterousness still impresses, with an unusual portrayal of You-Know-Who with an actor sticking his head into a glass tank through a hole in a table for closeups, and a puppet head in that infamous pickle jar for the long shots. Some connoisseurs of the worst should be rewarded if they're able to stick it out for the whole hour.

As much as people (especially video distributors) may want to call this film "so bad it's good," the simple truth is that it's incredibly boring. It opens with gassing an elephant to death, then it moves into a plot with some typical old-movie types going to Mexico. The youngest gets married during the vacation. This film is said to be two movies cobbled together, and it certainly appears that way. Until Hitler's wax head appears in a jar, it's pretty dull, with nothing interesting do do with its stock characters. When the head finally does appear, it's hardly ever shown, and when it melts in a jar is pretty messy. The moments of Hitler's head are the only things, save an occasional joke, that are funny, and the film contains nothing to recommend it, unless one is in media studies and interested in the portrayal of the archetypal young girl that gets married, because it is so stock, and not only that, the relationship is never really shown!