The Man Without a Body
The Man Without a Body (also known as Curse of Nostradamus) is a low budget 1957 British second feature[2] horror film, produced by Guido Coen and directed by Charles Saunders and W. Lee Wilder.Wealthy, vain New York City businessman Karl Brussard is behaving oddly – answering telephones that aren't ringing, forgetting that he owns ships in Miami, failing to recognise his own physician, Dr Charot.Brussard meets Merritt, his nurse Jean Cramer and Dr Lew Waldenhouse in London.Brussard decides that he needs a new brain and, during a visit to Madame Tussaud's wax museum, learns of Nostradamus.Brussard hires the drunken Dr Brandon and they go to France, open Nostradamus' crypt and steal his head.After Jean repairs the Omnigizer, the head speaks, identifying itself as Michel de Notre Dame.Brussard returns again and discovers that Lew has become a monster, with Nostradamus' head encased in what appears to be a shoulder-width box covered with surgical tape.Merritt and Jean run to a building with a bell tower and find Brussard chasing Nostradamus up a staircase."[11][12] The Man Without a Body was given an X-certificate by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) when it was released in the UK, which meant it was suitable for exhibition only to people age 16 or over.[20][21] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "This remarkable shocker piles its horrors up with such extravagant bathos that it finally achieves an almost surrealist quality of absurdity.Script, direction and playing are banal and amateurish; while a new foreign actress, Nadja Regin gives a performance of joyous inadequacy, quite in keeping with the general atmosphere.He comments that Don Willis, in his book Horror and Science Fiction Films, wrote that its 'fancy directorial touches' were 'wasted on a story which reaches awesome heights of ludicrousness' and that in A Heritage of Horror, British author David Pirie called the film a 'particularly ludicrous piece'.[6] Another British critic, Phil Hardy, writes that 'the direction by Saunders and Wilder (the brother of Billy) is decidedly pedestrian but the delirium of the central idea survives even its awkward articulation.He calls the acting "either non-existent or terrible or, in the case of Coulouris, so far over the top as to make it hard to imagine the actor ... took the proceedings seriously".