The Man With Two Brains

The first half hour or so of Steve Martin and Carl Reiner’s third collaboration (its predecessors were The Jerk  (1975) and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) is very funny but from that point it gradually degenerates into the repetitious and the ridiculous before eventually falling back on the desperate film-maker’s comedy recourse, slapstick.  And that’s without taking issue with Martin’s chronically juvenile sexism.

Martin plays a brilliant celebrity brain surgeon, Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (the name is a pretext for a running joke which is repeated far too many times).  Recently widowed,  he meets a good-looking but deranged gold-digger (Kathleen Turner) whom he marries but she refuses to consummate the marriage. Meanwhile he also meets Dr. Necessiter (David Warner) a crack-pot who has perfected a method for keeping brains alive once their owners are dead. Dr. Hfuhruhurr falls in love with one of the brains. You know where this is heading..r

I’m not a watcher of D grade schlock but spoofing such material is evidently much the point of the exercise here (much as it was in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.1975). Perhaps aficionados of such fare will get a kick out of the result but for me the best part of the film was before this starts.

Comedians are very much a love-or-hate proposition and whilst the latter may well finding it grating fans of Martin’s wound-up style will be well-served by his performance here as the vain and sexually frustrated doctor whilst Turner who gives us yet another variant of her stock-in-trade sexpot persona, is in good form opposite him.

That first half-hour aside, however, The Man With Two Brains is not as funny as it should have been.Then again neither was Young Frankenstein. Hands down the best example of this kind of thing is The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

FYI:  The brain is voiced by Sissy Spacek.

 

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