|
And
as usual -- like whenever I start one of
these marathons, Sinister
Soul Cinema month stumbles out of the
gates with a film that's long on potential
but short on results, proving most
definitively that two heads aren't
necessarily better than one...
*
* * *
Our
film opens with Dr. Maxwell Kirshner (Ray
Milland) arriving at his palatial mansion.
Once a world renowned specialist in organ
transplants, crippling arthritis has since
robbed Kirshner of his skills. Confined
him to a wheelchair, the doctor spends
most of his time running the Kirshner
Institute and Transplant Center (kinda
like the Mayo Clinic of body parts
swapping), but lately he's been
concentrating on his own "pet
project." While
being wheeled inside, down to his
super-secret laboratory, Dr. Kirshner is
briefed and updated on his test subject's
current vital signs, and is happy to hear
that there are no signs of rejection and
all traces of pneumonia have disappeared.
Over
in the corner of the lab, we spy a cage
and realize his patient is confined
within. And after a few suspenseful camera
turns, it's revealed that his patient is a
gorilla. (Well, a guy in a gorilla
suit. Rick Baker actually.) And not
just any gorilla: a gorilla...with TWO
HEADS! (Oh the horror and the --
hey, he's kinda cute.)
So
pleased with the gorilla's stabilization
is Kirshner, he wants to proceed with the
experiment and remove the gorilla's
original head. But when his two assistants
try to sedate the creature, they kinda
botch it; the gorilla escapes, runs amok,
and trashes the lab. Then the rampage
continues when the freak gorilla breaks
out of the mansion and gallops away,
dragging his knuckles behind him. Not
amused, Kirshner orders his bumbling help
to go and recapture it -- alive! or all
their work is lost. Idiot One and Idiot
Two do manage to track the monkey down to
the local grocery mart -- but only because
all the patrons are running out of it
screaming. (So either the gorilla
is in there, or Tom Green is doing
Shakespeare in his birthday suit.) Cautiously
entering with their tranquilizer gun
ready, they find the big galoot in the
produce aisle happily stuffing bananas
into it's two heads.
I'm
guessing it was an easy capture after that
because we immediately jump back to the
lab, where Kirshner is finishing up work
on the gorilla -- who is noticeably back
down to one head, making the operation a
complete success. (Except for poor
Cheetah lying over there in the bucket.)
Kirshner
returns to the Institute and meets with
his chief surgeon, Dr. Phillip Desmond (Roger
Perry). Seems the mad doctor wants
to let Desmond in on his experiments. Why?
I've got a pretty good idea, but we'll
have to wait because word has come that
Dr. Williams, their new associate, has
arrived for his first day. Williams'
work on the prevention of donor organ
rejection is tops in the field has them
anxious to meet him, but Kirshner seems
non-plussed when he arrives. And Desmond
is confused when Kirshner suddenly
withdraws the job offer, citing unexpected
budgetary cuts so they can't hire him. Dr.
Williams (Don Marshall), of
course, isn't very happy with this news; he
left his old job and took a substantial
pay cut to come and work for the great Dr.
Kirshner. Pointing out that he signed a
contract and is at least entitled to a
six-month probationary period, Kirshner
shows his true -- and odious -- reasons
for withdrawing the job offer when he
starts spewing racial slurs like "Why
do you people always try to work
into places where you don't
belong." Williams, who is black,
quickly realizes he's dealing with a
bigot, but does his part for affirmative
action and demands that he be granted his
trial period anyway. Kirshner gives in,
but promises his employment will be
terminated as soon as the six months are
up.
After
Williams leaves, Desmond tries to argue
with his boss about his narrow-mindedness;
but Kirshner says there is no time for
that, and has something to show him. They
go back to Kirshner's super-secret lab,
where he shows Desmond his notes and
x-rays of the gorilla experiments; then
the gorilla itself. Kirshner claims to
have discovered the secret of spinal
realignment, and how he's able to keep the
dismembered head alive until it can be
reattached via his machines and some
sci-fi-goobledy-gook about electrifying
nerve endings. (Which is kind of
what I did while rewiring my new dryer the
other day.) Desmond is astounded,
thinking this will revolutionize the
transplanting business and will start
writing up the necessary paperwork to get
it approved by the FDA. But Kirshner
says there isn't enough time for that, and
reveals that on top of the crippling
arthritis he has terminal chest cancer. (Can
you have chest cancer? Lung cancer, maybe,
but chest cancer?) His genius must
live on, and with only two to three weeks
to live, he asks Desmond to help him
secretly transplant his head onto a
healthy body. Drunk with scientific
discovery, Desmond agrees to do it -- if
they can find a suitable donor.
When
all the normal channels prove fruitless (--
normal channels to find a body for a head
transplant?), they grease the palm
of the Lt. Governor. If they can keep it
secret, and under strict security
supervision, he agrees to offer condemned
criminals the opportunity to donate their
bodies to science to avoid the electric
chair. However, there's still a catch: the
prisoners will still die; they'll just get
a thirty-day extension for the experiment;
but when it's completed, they'll die --
but they'll die for science! Obviously,
there are no takers. Weeks
pass and Kirshner grows more ill, to the
point where life-support is the only thing
keeping him alive. And even with the
machines, he only has two to three days
left. As Desmond is growing desperate, out
at the State Pen, the soundtrack
turns super-funky-soulful as condemned
criminal, Big Jack Moss (Rosey
Grier), is escorted down death-row
by several guards, the warden, and a
priest. (So he isn't on his way to
the cafeteria.) After they strap
Big Jack into the chair, the warden reads
his sentence and asks if he has any last
words. Still
professing his innocence, Big Jack says
his girlfriend is real close to getting
the evidence to prove it and thirty days
ought to do it, so he agrees to take part
in the mystery experiment to stay his
execution.
The
prisoner is escorted to Kirshner's
mansion, where his private staff has
converted his super-secret lab into a
super-secret surgical center. Desmond is
speechless when he meets Big Jack, knowing
Kirshner's feelings about African
Americans, but he's desperate and time is
short.
Jack is placed on a gurney and sedated,
and while a tech shaves the side of his
neck, he asks Desmond if the experiment
will hurt -- but dozes off before he gets
an answer. Then, as Spike Jones hijacks
the soundtrack for the surgery with a lot
of gongs, hiccups, and gurgles, Jack's
head is shifted to the side a bit to make
room for Kirshner's head --
unceremoniously lopped off his decaying
body and attached to the magic machine.
After much surgical jargon about
mosquito-clamps, retractors, and a machine
that goes *PING* Kirshner's head is
attached to Jack's hulking frame beside
it's owners original head. The surgery
completed, all Desmond can do is wait and
see if the new head takes, or turns
gangrenous and falls off. (OK, I
made that last part up.)
There
was some explanation as to why they had
to have both heads attached for a while,
but it didn't make any sense aside from
plot-contrivance so I won't bother to
pass it along.
Time
passes, and eventually Kirshner's head is
the first to regain consciousness. Desmond
is right by his side, and though groggy,
Kirshner can feel his new and powerful
body. His assistant tries to delicately
tell him about the body being black but
Kirshner is too excited and keeps
interrupting him. Able to raise his new
left arm, Kirshner sees Big Jack's
enormous paw, is dumbfounded, and quickly
melts into rage. But
before Desmond can explain, Jack's head
wakes up, too. As the two heads start to
argue -- You got your Rosey
Grier in my Ray Milland! You've got your
Ray Milland in my Rosey Grier --
Jack realizes what happened and freaks out,
screaming "What did you do to
me!" Luckily, they get his head
sedated before he can pull any stitches. Desmond
warns it will take ten to fourteen days
before Kirshner's head asserts itself over
the other, and until then, Jack's head
will have to be sedated.
But
the patient takes a turn for the worse as
infection and pneumonia set in. Needing
help, specifically Dr. William's help,
Desmond finds him at the institute and
convinces him to join the project -- but
doesn't reveal the true nature of the
experiment. As things
get even more dicey, Desmond orders the
sedative dosages to be reduced to help the
body fight off infection. (Uh-oh.)
With William's help in the lab, they
manage to stabilize the patient and it
looks like the incredible two-headed
transplant will survive. (No, wait,
that's the other two-headed movie.)
When
a nurse takes the patient's latest round
of injections from Williams, he yells at
her because she's running late. Too late,
actually, for in the super-secret lab,
Jack is waking up! He hears Kirshner
snoring, then the door opening and feigns
sleep. The nurse approaches, needle in
hand, and Jack springs into action. Grabbing
her and the needle, he deposits the
injection into her derriere and she
promptly passes out. (That's some
fast acting stuff.) Moving
quietly, to not wake Kirshner up, Jack
gets his clothes on. And his extra head
proves a big enough distraction that he
easily takes out the guards. Desmond and
the others try to stop him from leaving,
but he has a gun stolen from one of the
guards. Jack asks Williams if the
"soul brother" has got a car. He
does, so Jack
elects him to be his chauffer. By now,
Kirshner is awake and starts spitting
racial slurs as they get into the car and
roar off.
Desmond
and one of the assistants give chase. They
spot a patrolmen and tell them Big Jack
Moss has escaped and gives them a
description of William's car. In
that car, as Kirshner grumbles about how
their kind always stick together, Jack
asks Williams if he's a doctor, and, if
so, can he get this, pointing at
Kirshner's head, off? (Just pull it
off, big daddy.) But Williams warns
if Jack kills the spare head, he kills
himself. (Oh, never mind, big
daddy.) Williams thinks he can do
it but he'll need the right equipment for
a simple amputation. When the police catch
up, Big Jack takes over the driving and
manages to lose the pursuing cars. Nothing
can be done to avoid the blockades,
though, so they ditch the car and hike
into the countryside to lay low. While
they rest, Williams asks Jack what
he did to get arrested. Jack says a cop
got killed by a gun he used to own. He has
an alibi the night of the murder, but the
alibi is Willy Thompson, a known felon,
who was hiding out at Jack's until the
heat was off from his latest caper. When
he was arrested, Willy skipped town, and Jack
was railroaded straight to the chair; but
his girlfriend, Lila, has been searching
for Willy ever since.
Later,
the police find the abandoned car and call
in a helicopter to help search for the
fugitives. Speaking of which, since Jack's
head has dozed off, Kirshner tries to
bribe Williams into helping him return to
his super-secret lab. Promised a full
partnership and equal credit with the new
and revolutionary transplant procedure,
Williams sees right through it and says to
forget about persuading him because he
won't listen to, or work for, a bigot. Overhead,
the police helicopter spots them and opens
fire. On the run again, the two and half
fugitive come across a dirt-bike track
where one of the racers wipes out. Seeing
the two-headed monster, he abandons the
bike and runs away. Big
Jack commandeers the bike, Williams jumps
on the back, he revs it up, and away they
go, running amok on the racecourse.
Now
that's how you avoid the a police
dragnet. Run amok on a public racetrack
and go in circles for a half-hour. Man,
they'll never find you.
The
cops that are called in aren't very bright,
though, and try and run their patrol cars
on the rough track to chase them with
little success and the expected disastrous
results. Then Big Jack knocks out all the
other racers, takes the checkered flag,
and roars off the track and out of sight.
Back
at the Institute, Desmond takes a call
from the Lt. Governor and gets and earful
since their security and secrecy umbrella
has been shattered. Big Jack Moss is on
the loose, and worse yet, hundreds of
witnesses claim he's been turned into a
two-headed monster. Since Desmond won't
confirm -- nor deny -- anything to him or
the press about the experiment or the two
heads, the "former" Lt. Governor
thanks teh doctor for helping him commit
political suicide and hangs up.
Next,
our film is interrupted by a twenty-minute
demo-derby and reenactment of Hiltz's
motorcycle ride from The
Great Escape
with
about a dozen police cars as the Germans
and Rosie Grier and a dummy head that sort
of looks like Ray Milland glued on his
shoulder as Steve McQueen. After the smoke
clears, fourteen patrol cars are ready for
the junk heap and Buford T. Justice's
distant cousin jumps up and down on top of
his former squad car.
Night
falls and Jack, Kirshner and Williams
makes it to Lila's (Chelsea Brown)
pad. (Being Big Jack's girlfriend
you'd think the cops would have that place
staked out?) She's happy to see him,
and is actually pretty cool about a
middle-aged white guy's head being
attached to her big lover. Her only
question revolves around Jack having two
of anything else. (Wanh-wanh-wanh-waaaanh-boing!)
Jack
is feeling a bit frisky but Lila is
spooked off by Kirshner's head. (His
head-head! He's only got two of one thing
remember!) So Jack takes a nap, and
while he sleeps, Kirshner realizes he can
assert more control over Jack's body and
practices moving his arms. In
the kitchen, Lila convinces Williams that
Jack is innocent; she has several
detectives tracking Willy Thompson down,
and it's only a matter of time before they
find him. During dinner, Kirshner makes
with more slurs and stereotypes until
Williams shuts him up when he announces
that he's going to help Jack; he won't let
Kirshner kill him and take over his body.
That settles it; Jack says the vote is
three to one and Kirshner has to got to
go.
Later
that night, Jack and Williams break into a
medical warehouse, and while Williams
looks for the right drugs for the
operation, Kirshner manages to take
control of Jack's body and starts smacking
Jack in the face. Using the brute's body,
Kirshner first knocks Williams out and
then sucker punches Jack's head, too,
knocking it unconscious. Finding a phone,
Kirshner calls Desmond and orders him to
prepare the super-secret lab for the
immediate amputation of Jack's head. But
when Desmond says he can't because the
police are watching him, Kirshner says
forget it; he'll do it himself. Williams
wakes up in time to see Kirshner roar off
in the car. Knowing he'll try to get rid
of Jack's head, and there's only one place
he can do that safely and in secret,
Williams calls Lila to come and get him --
and to hurry.
Kirshner
makes it back to his mansion and his
super-secret lab. Preparing an amputation
tray, he lies down on the gurney and
prepares a local anesthetic. And he's
about to inject it when Williams and Lila
burst in and stop him.
At
the institute, Desmond receives an
anonymous phone call that he can find Dr.
Kirshner in his super-secret lab -- but
he'd better hurry. And when Desmond
arrives at the mansion, he finds
Kirshner's dismembered head lying on the
gurney attached to the magic machine,
demanding that he find him another body. (Just
pull the plug already!)
From
that macabre sight, we move to a car
speeding away, and while "Oh
Happy Day"
plays on the radio, Jack, Lila and
Williams head toward parts unknown --
I gonna assume to find Willy Thompson.
The
End
"The
most fantastic medical experiment ever
dared! They transplanted a white bigot's
head onto a soul brother's body! And
now, with the fights and the fuzz, the
choppers and the chicks, they're in
deeeeep trouble!"
That's
what the promotional poster promised us
for this movie, and -- well, it just
didn't quite deliver and probably should
have read more something like this:
"The
most fantastic medical experiment ever
dared! They transplanted a white bigot's
head onto a soul brother's body! And
now, with the fights and the fuzz, the
choppers and the chicks, the audience
is in deeeeep trouble -- if they can
stay awake, that is!"
An
exploitation piece made under the guise of
social satire, The
Thing with Two Heads
breaks the biggest cardinal sin a B-Movie
can commit: it is bland, and therefore,
incredibly dull. Starting out strong with
the two-headed gorilla, and maintaining
the momentum up to the actual grafting of
Milland's head onto Grier's body, after
that, the script just doesn't quite know
what to do with it's monster and
eventually just peeters out.
A
collaborative effort from director Lee
Frost and screenwriter Wes Bishop, trying
to cash in on the burgeoning
blaxploitation market, these two were
familiar names in the naughty, Soft-X
movies of the late '60s like House
on Bare Mountain and other lurid
Roughies for Bob Cresse's Olympic
International, including Hot
Spur -- an
X-rated version of The
Wild Bunch,
where the rapes are shown in slow-motion --
and The
Pick-Up;
the definitive sleaze-noir to end all
definitive sleaze-noir. These
two also had hands in a couple of Mondo
movies, the
Nazisploitation Love
Camp 7,
and the ultimate movie anachronism The
Black Gestapo.
Produced
in 1971 by Sam
Arkoff and American International
Pictures, it came our right around the
same time as their other double-headed
feature: The
Incredible Two Headed Transplant.
Both films have novel ideas, but both
spend way too much time spinning their
wheels, ultimately to the viewers regret.
The film's press kit also came at the end
of the famed studio's attempt at
ballyhooed promotions; urging theater
owners to obtain one of the ghoulish
plastic heads available at trick and
novelty stores and have it set on the
shoulder of a tall man so that he can walk
through busy shopping sections of town
with a sandwich board advertising the play
date. If that failed, try to frame an ear
of corn which has two big bites taken out
it and post a sign stating: BITTEN BY THE
THING WITH TWO HEADS.
What
a couple of troopers Ray Milland and Rosey
Grier prove to be during this picture.
These guys spent a lot of time in very
close proximity to each other, though I
think the Milland's fake head almost had
as much -- if not more -- screen time as
the legendary actor did. Grier
became an actor and folk singer after
terrorizing the NFL for the Los Angeles
Rams as a member of the Fearsome Foursome;
along side Lamar Lundy, Deacon Jones and
Merlin Olson. He was also one of the
people who caught and detained Sirhan
Sirhan after he shot Bobby Kennedy; Grier
stuck his thumb in the trigger casing, so
the assassin couldn't shoot anymore.
Later, he went on to a reoccurring role as
Benjy in the '70s "Keep on
trucking" staple Moving
On,
and later became a preacher and an
advocate for the moral majority. His
co-star, Milland, has a long and storied
acting career. Winning an Oscar for his
role in The
Lost Weekend,
by the '50s and '60s the only work he
could find was in low-budget B-movies like
Panic
in the Year Zero
and X-The
Man with X-Ray Eyes.
Milland continued to work for AIP into the
'70s with this picture and the ecology
gone amok oddity Frogs.
We children of the '70s will also remember
him as the vile Sire Uri who always butted
heads with Commander Adama in Battlestar
Galactica.
The
rest of the cast may also look familiar to
you, too. Don Marshall just ended his run
as Captain Dan Erickson on Irwin Allen's Land
of the Giants.
And Chelsea Brown was one of the go-go
dancers from Laugh
In.
Around the same time, Roger Perry could
also be seen fighting off Count
Yorga.
And if you check the credits, you realize
that Frost and Bishop show up in the cast
too, as a doctor and a police officer.
When
it's all said and down, The
Thing with Two Heads
is a colossal disappointment on almost all
fronts. You can't blame the cast because
they do a good job with what they've been
given, so most of the blame can, and
should, be laid at Frost and Bishop's
feet. The film just has an annoying habit
of building up a situation that has
absolutely no pay off -- or an extremely
lame one. And situation that should be
funny come off as just plain dumb.
One
could almost make an argument that the
film lost all momentum in the grocery
store after the two-headed gorilla
escaped. After a tense search of the food
aisles, the moron twins find the gorilla
happily eating some bananas. It's supposed
to be funny, and it is, to a point, but
you can almost hear the films momentum
deflating like a whoopee cushion that no
one sat on -- so you do it by hand. The
joke is ruined, you're crushed; so someone
offers to inflate the cushion again and
they'll sit on it to try and cheer you up
-- but it's not the same thing. Is this
making any sense? Let's see: one,
two...five empty bottles -- no probably
not. *sigh*
So
the film is sunk by a paper thin plot, bad
pacing, and sloppy editing, and -- no
matter who's acting in it, or how many
heads are involved -- it can't be saved. And
how come The
Thing With Two Heads Heads
(check
the title-card) doesn't get as much
grief as Larry Buchanan's Attack
of the the Eye Creatures?
|
