The Man with Two Brains (1983)

It seemed that things couldn’t be better for Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (Steve Martin). As he explains to a newspaper reporter, he’s at the top of his profession—“My brilliant research in brain transplantation is unsurpassed and will probably make my name live beyond eternity”—and he has just married beautiful Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner). Unfortunately for Dr. Hfuhruhurr, his new wife is a black widow who drives her rich husbands into early graves. Her chosen method in this case? Withholding marital favors with the aim of inducing a stroke in her sexually frustrated husband.

Hoping to jump-start his marriage, Dr. Hfuhruhurr decides to take his wife with him to a meeting of the Austrian Institute of Craniology in Vienna, where he plans to speak on his theory of brain transplantation.

When he gets to the meeting, he prefaces his demonstration with a shocking declaration: “Ladies and gentlemen, I can envision a day when the brains of brilliant men can be kept alive in the bodies of dumb people.” But the demonstration is aborted when, while performing his groundbreaking “cranial screw top method” of brain surgery on a cadaver, he ends up pulling a bunch of lemons out of the cadaver’s skull instead of a brain. It seems someone has been stealing the brains of Vienna.