Nefarious spies spirit away Professor John Coleman (John Holland), the only man who can synthesize an antidote for a deadly nerve gas. Coleman's daughter Kathy (Audrey Caire) and security agent son-in-law Phil Day (Walter Stocker) are approached by suspicious Latin Teo Padua (Carlos Rivas), who is soon murdered after giving them only one clue: Mandoras. Kathy and Phil go to Mandoras and discover from Teo's handsome brother Camino (Rivas again) that both her father and her sister Suzanne (Dani Lynn) have been taken there as part of a diabolical Nazi plan to conquer the world. Camino explains how Adolf Hitler's head was kept alive and brought to the island nation. Now the Americans must escape and save the world. Can they trust the shady Presidente (Pedro Regas) and his police chief Alaniz (Nestor Paiva)?

Madmen of Mandoras is clearly a case, pardon the metaphors, of crazy ambition going for broke, only to crash and burn. The 'auteur' in question is David Bradley, a Chicago-born filmmaker who broke into Hollywood in the late 1940s by the unlikely route of home-made experimental films (see Savant's Unseen Cinema review) and 16mm feature versions of Julius Caesar and Peer Gynt. Bradley's star in these films was the young Charlton Heston who was soon picked up by Hal Wallis and given star billing in his first feature. By some chain of events -- it's not determined to what extent Bradley and Heston helped each other, or if they were even in contact -- Bradley got a directing job on a low budget MGM feature starring George Murphy and Nancy Davis, Talk About a Stranger. Relocated to Hollywood, Bradley's directing output fell off, with a couple of juvenile delinquent and Science Fiction pictures in the late 50s and early 60s.

At UCLA, we knew David Bradley as an Associate Professor with an exaggerated theatrical personality, who taught film appreciation classes. He had a phenomenal 16mm film library that was said to number into the thousands of classic titles, many of them silent films including (it was said) treasures to be found nowhere else. UCLA students got the benefit of access to his collection.

I say all of the above to illustrate that an elevated appreciation of movie history doesn't translate into good moviemaking. Talk About a Stranger is a small dramatic story with carefully thought-out visuals, much like some of Bradley's experimental work. Twelve to the Moon and Madmen of Mandoras simply aren't stories that can be adequately filmed on a shoestring. Worse, they have terrible scripts that only a directing genius could save. Both pictures are devoid of excitement. It's obvious that the budget for Madmen of Mandoras was expended on the interior dramatic scenes, which are competently filmed and lighted by Stanley Cortez with a look similar to his Night of the Hunter. But the dramatics and the logistics of the complicated plot are far too much for Bradley to handle. Corman would look at the project and say, too many characters, too many locations, too much bad writing. Bradley obviously went nuts trying to do the impossible.

About 50% of the show is lame footage of arrivals and departures at unconvincing locations. Nondescript buildings are meant to be government offices and Los Angeles neighborhoods and hilltop roads don't fool anybody. Griffith Park doesn't look like a Caribbean island, and a President's palace shouldn't be just another house in a swanky Los Feliz neighborhood. Cars drive in broad daylight but when we cut inside (to that soundstage work) it's pitch dark. The Mandoras airport is obviously the space between some studio soundstages, with a travel poster and a potted palm tree wheeled in. The underground Nazi bunkers look suspiciously like concrete film vaults in Hollywood. We don't believe that scientists are scientists or that the secret agent hero is even a policeman; he doesn't behave in any way like an intelligence agent. Even when the acting is reasonable, the atrocious script (and Bradley's lack of good blocking) undermines every scene. It's not like we're even seeing a movie.

Critics always bring up the scene where Carlos Rivas is killed car-to-car at an intersection, because after the loud gunshot, Audrey Caire and Walter Stocker are surprised that Rivas is injured and then 'discover' that he's been shot. This is because Crown International dubbed in a loud gun sound effect, when Bradley intended the killers to use a silencer. the scene is yet another imitation of Fritz Lang's classic assassination from The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, repeated in his own The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and the Harry Palmer spy film The Ipcress File.

And that's the key: Bradley thought he was making a Mabuse-like sophisticated spy thriller. Probably filmed prior to the big success of Dr. No, Mandoras definitely has some 007 aspects, but Bradley's film might as well be called Plan Nine from Mandoras. The overall bankruptcy of the entire project makes fairly competent setups (like the flashback bunker operating room, designed by Paul Sylos) look idiotic.

Madmen of Mandoras is feeble on most counts. Some sets are just pitifully poor and the depiction of Latin Americans is demeaning. The ending action (filmed in Bronson Caverns!) is simply awful; and the dumb conclusion ('wild' sister Suzanne marries Camino Padua, son of El Presidente) painfully lame. At the fadeout, the fact that the lab security office back is still rife with double agents, is ignored.

With of course brings us to the Hitler-head footage, which is bad-movie gold. Back in Germany, Hitler (Bill Freed) raves in 'geshputtle' nonsense Deutsch, and for no good reason ends up as a disembodied head in a bell jar tote-pak, like Luce Potter in Invaders from Mars. In Mandoras the persnickety paperhanger stays in the dome and grimaces, snarls and smiles nefariously, even when being driven around in a black sedan!

Madmen of Mandoras reportedly received a brief theatrical run (a kind phrase) before showing up in the customary 2 a.m. TV slot for movies of the damned. Then at some point it was replaced with a variant version with a more direct schlock title, They Saved Hitler's Brain. That version is on this disc as well.

Judging by the look of things almost two reels of brain-deadening extra content were slapped on to the front of They Saved Hitler's Brain sometime in the early 70s. The main titles show some credit alterations but retain the old 1963 copyright date card. In the terrible new footage, a pair of dull secret agents -- who look more like employees in a credit union -- drive around the streets of Van Nuys (Wayne Schmidt can pinpoint the houses!), playing car-tag with Evil Mandoras agents driving a beat-up Lincoln Continental to match the one in Bradley's footage. They're investigating the death of another scientist in eighteen additional minutes of pointless, incompetent padding clearly intended to bring the film up to length to fill a two-hour TV slot. Two violent stock shots are cribbed from Robert Mitchum's 1958 Thunder Road. The Madmen of Mandoras part of the show then plays out with minor changes, such as the shortening of the gory melting of Hitler's wax head. The new and old footage stand apart like night and day.

Madmen of Mandoras and They Saved Hitler's Brain teach important lessons in low-budget filmmaking: Don't make an epic on a dime store budget, and don't think that elevated cinematic taste will prevent you from making one of the worst films of all time!