Professor Coleman, a top scientist who has created the antidote to a deadly nerve gas called "G Gas", is kidnapped. After two investigators fail to track him down, his son-in-law Phil (Walter Stocker) and daughter Kathy (Audrey Caire) are given a tip that he has been taken to the Caribbean island of Mandoras. They follow, only to find themselves in the midst of a Nazi plot, leading to an encounter with the most evil man who ever lived.
Well, a part of the most evil man who ever lived. This muddle started life as an unreleased fifties B-movie called The Madmen of Mandoras (written by Richard Miles); in the sixties, film students added new footage to pad out the running time, which served to confuse the plot even more, and the whole caboodle was given a new, give-the-game-away title. While not as incomprehensible as its reputation, the result does only start to make its own kind of sense after the new footage is over with.
Included in that new footage are two bits from the Robert Mitchum moonshine thriller Thunder Road: a car bomb at the very beginning, and a car crash that finishes off one of the investigators. Those two investigators are painfully amateurish, a man with a bushy moustache and a blonde woman in a miniskirt who bicker frequently and are obviously nothing to do with the real plot, as they look as if they have left the fifties far behind.
Once they're out of the way, we get down to business with something that sounds like a Spike Milligan sketch, but proceeds like an alien invasion film where Martians have been replaced by Nazis. The rumour that key players in the Third Reich had fled to South America fuels the storyline, and the Fuehrer himself, we are told in an extraordinary flashback, had been forcing doctors to give him eternal life through their experiments. Now his head has been saved (not just the brain) and is planning to conquer the world with the G Gas.
A terrible film by any reasonable judgement, They Saved Hitler's Brain has its fair share of bizarre moments. Look at the butler who very slowly leaves the room after serving the drinks, or the nightclub singer who tries to stop a shootout with her dancing. But nothing beats the sight of the Fuehrer's head glaring from its jar, whether it's sitting on a sort of throne in front of a huge swastika, or being carried around by a handle - a sort of Hitler handbag. Our heroes manage to save humanity fairly easily, so thankfully the whole Nazi resurgence looks to be a tenth-rate effort all round. Much like this film.
