Backdrop fallback

Donovan's Brain

Donovan's Brain

Share

Donovan's Brain

"A dead man's brain in a hidden laboratory told him to KILL... KILL... KILL"

1953

1h 23m

6.2(41 votes)

Science Fiction

Horror

Thriller

Overview

A scientist takes the brain of dead man and revives it via electrodes as it lays suspended in a tank of liquid. Soon, the brain grows to possess enormous psychic powers and inflicts its personality upon the doctor who saved it, creating a "Jekyll and Hyde" paradigm.

Links & Resources

Social & External

Production Companies

United Artists

The people behind it

Cast & crew

10 featured cast members

Starring

Lew Ayres

Lew Ayres

Dr. Patrick J. Cory

Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan

Janice Cory

Gene Evans

Gene Evans

Dr. Frank Schratt

Steve Brodie

Steve Brodie

Herbie Yocum

Tom Powers

Tom Powers

Donovan's Washington Advisor

Lisa Howard

Lisa Howard

Chloe Donovan

James Anderson

James Anderson

Chief Tuttle

Victor Sutherland

Victor Sutherland

Nathaniel Fuller

Michael Colgan

Michael Colgan

Tom Donovan

Peter Adams

Peter Adams

Mr. Webster

Creative team

Directed by: Felix E. Feist
Written by: Felix E. Feist
Produced by: Tom Gries

Similar Movies

Clones

Clones

In the far future, a professor of quantum physics is about to undergo surgery to remove his brain tumor, and is offered a backup of his brain for safety reasons.

KillerKiller

KillerKiller

In the middle of nowhere, there lies a secure facility housing only serial killers. One morning the doors are open and the guards have vanished, but a strange freezing mist surrounds the building, preventing the inmates from leaving. Then, one by one, they are murdered. The survivors bicker, fight and blame each other, but the thing that's killing them looks suspiciously like a traditional 'victim'... A babysitter in a shower, a cheerleader, a camper...

Ash

Ash

On the mysterious planet of Ash, Riya awakens to find her crew slaughtered. When a man named Brion arrives to rescue her, an ordeal of psychological and physical terror ensues while Riya and Brion must decide if they can trust one another to survive.

Blood Relations

Blood Relations

A trip to meet her fiance's family becomes a descent into hell when Marie discovers that her future husband wants more than just a wife... Dying for a rich husband, Marie is thrilled when Thomas brings her home to his family's massive estate. But there is something wrong in the house, and as the days go by and Marie wanders the dim halls, she makes a gruesome discovery. There is a lab underground, and a body, and all that's missing is a brain...

Aimy in a Cage

Aimy in a Cage

A teenage orphan and delinquent rebels against her evil family during a global virus outbreak.

Cyst

Cyst

In the 1960s, a nurse's last day on her job is ruined when a doctor inadvertently creates a cyst monster that terrorizes the office.

The Crime of Doctor Crespi

The Crime of Doctor Crespi

A crazed scientist invents a serum that induces a catatonic state in anyone who gets the injection. He uses the serum to paralyze his enemies, in order to bury them alive.

Cocky – The Running Doctor

Cocky – The Running Doctor

Dr. Eugene has a goal - to perform the operation of his life. To do this, he escapes from a certain research institute of the brain and begins to look for the only person suitable for this purpose.

A Macabre Legacy

A Macabre Legacy

A plastic surgeon goes mad when he discovers that his wife have an affair. He fakes her death and disfigure her and locks her in the cellar.

The Crawling Brain

The Crawling Brain

Stefan learns that his invalid grandmother was the nurse/lover of Nazi doctor Franz Kindler and that she removed his brain when the Nazis were losing WW2. Unable to successfully perform a transplant on test subjects, she needs Stefan to carry on for her now that her health is failing.

The Alien Within

After having a feud with director Kenneth J. Hall, producer Fred Olen Ray hired Ted Newsom to shoot brand new footage (on video) to weave in with scenes from Hall's film Evil Spawn (1987).

Human Prey

Human Prey

A psychologist snaps, becomes a vigilante and wipes out inner city "scum." Occasionally he kidnaps bad girls and hookers and and hunts them for sport Most Dangerous Game style.

The Sunken-Eyed Ghost

The Sunken-Eyed Ghost

A mad doctor uses a fake taxi driver to kidnap victims and then removes their eyes in hopes of perfecting an eye transplant that will allow his blind wife to see again. One of the doctor's servants ends up getting possessed by not one, but several of the victims.

Get Out

Get Out

Chris and his girlfriend Rose go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family's overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he never could have imagined.

The Quiet Ones

The Quiet Ones

A professor and his students perform a dangerous experiment that causes a young woman to lose her sanity.

The Laughing Dead

The Laughing Dead

A busload of travelers and their disgraced priest tour guide, on the hunt for Aztec ruins, decide to stop in a Mexican village on the eve of the Day of the Dead. Unbeknownst to them, a local doctor plans to begin a diabolical ritual intended to bring about Hell on Earth.

Saw III

Saw III

Jigsaw has disappeared. Along with his new apprentice Amanda, the puppet-master behind the cruel, intricate games that have terrified a community and baffled police has once again eluded capture and vanished. While city detectives scramble to locate him, Doctor Lynn Denlon and Jeff Reinhart are unaware that they are about to become the latest pawns on his vicious chessboard.

Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage

In order to save an assassinated scientist, a submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into his bloodstream.

The Price We Pay

The Price We Pay

After a pawn shop robbery goes askew, two criminals take refuge at a remote farmhouse to try to let the heat die down, but find something much more menacing.

Digest

Geoff, a man with an unusual compulsion to eat inedible objects, calls on the unorthodox services of backstreet practitioner Doctor Dora in order to cure his ailment.

Recommended Movies

The Black Sleep

The Black Sleep

In 19th century England, a noted brain surgeon rescues a former student from being hanged on a false conviction for murder, and spirits him away to an ancient, repurposed abbey far in the countryside. There, he connives his pupil into assisting him in mapping the functions of the various parts of the human brain, using living subjects who are under a terrible animation-suspending drug called "black sleep". Subsequently, the student, along with the daughter of one of the subjects, discover that most of these subjects have survived but are being kept in a dungeon-like cellar, in various stages of physical and mental derangement...

Scanners

Scanners

A scientist trains a man with an advanced telepathic ability called 'scanning' to stop a dangerous Scanner with extraordinary psychic powers from waging war against non-Scanners.

Looker

Looker

Plastic surgeon Larry Roberts performs a series of minor alterations on a group of models who are seeking perfection. The operations are a resounding success. But when someone starts killing his beautiful patients, Dr. Roberts becomes suspicious and starts investigating. What he uncovers are the mysterious - and perhaps murderous - activities of a high-tech computer company called Digital Matrix.

Possessor

Possessor

Tasya Vos, an elite corporate assassin, uses brain-implant technology to take control of other people’s bodies to terminate high profile targets. As she sinks deeper into her latest assignment, Vos becomes trapped inside a mind that threatens to obliterate her.

Limitless

Limitless

The life of an unsuccessful writer is transformed by a top-secret 'smart drug' that allows him to use 100% of his brain and become a perfect version of himself. His enhanced abilities soon attract shadowy forces that threaten his new life.

Tau

Tau

Held captive in a futuristic smart house, a woman hopes to escape by befriending the A.I. program that controls the house.

Saw III

Saw III

Jigsaw has disappeared. Along with his new apprentice Amanda, the puppet-master behind the cruel, intricate games that have terrified a community and baffled police has once again eluded capture and vanished. While city detectives scramble to locate him, Doctor Lynn Denlon and Jeff Reinhart are unaware that they are about to become the latest pawns on his vicious chessboard.

The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone

Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.

Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future

With his partner Caprice, celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use Tenser's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.

Stonehearst Asylum

Stonehearst Asylum

An Oxford Medical School graduate takes a position at a mental institution and soon becomes obsessed with a female mental patient, but he has no idea of a recent and horrifying staffing change.

Die Alone

Die Alone

Lost in a world reclaimed by nature and overrun by mysterious creatures, Ethan, a young man with amnesia navigates the dangerous landscape in search of his lost love Emma. His journey takes an unexpected turn when he encounters Mae, a hardened and eccentric survivor. Together, Ethan and Mae face threats both human and otherwise before a fateful encounter with Kai unravels a secret that lies just beyond Ethan's fractured memory.

The Resurrected

The Resurrected

Charles Dexter Ward, a wealthy scientist, uses an ancient diary and human remains to begin a terrifying and bloody pursuit for immortality.

Prodigy

Prodigy

Jimmy is a committed child psychologist who uses his own playbook, but when he is brought in to work with Ellie, he is completely unprepared for his subject—a 9-year-old psychopathic genius with nothing to lose. As he begins to understand the extent of her capabilities and the fate that has been planned for her, he struggles to overcome her defenses before it is too late for them both.

Self/less

Self/less

An extremely wealthy elderly man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness to the body of a healthy young man but everything may not be as good as it seems when he starts to uncover the mystery of the body's origins and the secret organization that will kill to keep its secrets.

Patrick

Patrick

A comatose hospital patient harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis to claim his private nurse as his own.

Replicant

Replicant

Scientists create a genetic clone of a serial killer in order to help catch the killer, teaming up with two cops.

Books of Blood

Books of Blood

A journey into uncharted and forbidden territory through three tales tangled in space and time.

The Medusa Touch

The Medusa Touch

A French detective in London reconstructs the life of a man lying in hospital with severe injuries with the help of journals and a psychiatrist. He realises that the man had powerful telekinetic abilities.

Jekyll & Hyde

Jekyll & Hyde

Henry Jekyll is a troubled man. His wife died of pneumonia. He wants his sister-in-law, but her father forbids any contact. And his experiments into the dual nature of man have yielded a personality-splitting drug that he has tested on himself, changing him into an uninhibited brute who seeks violent and undignified pleasures. Jekyll quickly becomes addicted to the sordid freedom induced by the drug. He can commit the most enjoyably revolting deeds, then return to his laboratory and use an antidote to change back to his original form, so that his lofty persona remains untarnished.

The Inhabitant

The Inhabitant

Like any other teenage girl, Tara is just surviving high school — yet her father and mother seem strangely distant. Amidst a nearby spree of gruesome ax murders, Tara has sightings of terrifying entities, forcing her to question her own sanity and shocking ancestry.