Thursday Movie Picks #171: Body Horror

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're in October, which of course ends with Halloween, so the subjects this month are all technically Halloween-related. This third Thursday in October has the theme of "Body Horror", which I'm taking to mean disfigurement or, in particular, losing body parts. I'm actually picking four movies this week, with three firmly in the horror genre:

Mad Love (1935). Colin Clive plays a concert pianist whose hands are mangled in a train crash. He's in luck, however, in that there's a condemned killer about to die, and a helpful made doctor (Peter Lorre) is willing to do a black-market hand transplant. Of course, it turns out that the condmened man was a murderer who threw knives to kill, and those hands continue to want to throw knives instead of playing the piano. One of several versions of the "Hands of Orlac" story.

The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962). A young doctor experimenting with transplants gets in a car accident that unfortunately kills his girlfriend by decapitation. But since he's trying to do transplants, he gets the idea to keep his girlfriend's head alive until he can find a suitable body for her. Of course, "suitable" means cruising the strip joints and rather skeezily looking for a hot young woman. Meanwhile, back at the lab, the girlfriend's head is beginning to develop telepathy with the experiment locked behind a door....

Eyes Without a Face (1960). A French doctor feels responsible for the accident that left his daughter with a mangled face, so he's desperate to make it up to her by doing a face transplant. Of course, nobody is actually willing to be a face donor, and the doctor has to kidnap young women to try to do the transplant. Meanwhile, the daughter's boyfriend was told she died, but he's convinced she's still alive (she is, of course).

Finally, there's Kings Row (1942). Charles Coburn plays the doctor who plays God, deciding who's worthy of keeping their limbs and who isn't. When Ronald Reagan gets in a work accident at the railyard, Coburn decides that Reagan most definitely isn't worthy of those legs. This is the movie in which Reagan utters the immortal line "Where's the rest of me" on finding out that he no longer has legs.