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From SCIFIPEDIA
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The Brain That Wouldn't Die! is a standard crazy-scientist movie from the early 1959 except for the creepy performance of Virginia Leith and the early use of gore.
Dr. Bill Cortner has a mad desire to rearrange human anatomy. He's got a deformed lab assistant hoping that his silence will be rewarded with a new arm. He's got a huge lab in the basement of his suburban home. And he's got something that's marginally sentient locked in a dark room off the lab.
What he's missing is a beautiful Tinker Toy.
After some abortive tries at abducting self-hating women (models, naturally), luck favors him and frowns on Jan, his girlfriend. Cortner's car crashes and the only thing that can be salvaged is Jan's head.
Jan's new home is a white roasting pan, the whole of her steadied by bunsen-burner props. A skin-tight, virginally white cowel (like the flying nun, but no wings) covers all but her strikingly beautiful (and made-up) face.
Her bitterness grows even as Cortner seems to lose interest in her as a girlfriend or a specimen. Kurt, the deformed assistant is getting pissed, too, waiting for a hunk of forearm and bicep. The thing in the back room wants out in the worst way, and it and Jan can communicate in some basic way.
A table of anger, regret and phantom-limb pain is set when Cortner brings in a new woman that he says will provide him with the body Jan lacks. But even if she could play the Trust Game, Jan's not buying Cortner's story.
In quick order, the thing in the dark room rips off Kurt's arm--his good arm, no less--the doctor's killed, an errant hooker is rescued by Toxie's dad, and Jan laughs like a chain-smoking Miami divorce spending her alimony at the track. The film ends as flames lick closer to her pan.
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