| Thing With Two Heads, The Released: 1972 MPAA Rating: PG Genre: Mad Scientist Nuts And Bolts: The evil head of racism. Summary: The main character in this feature is a greasy old fuck named Dr. Maxwell Kirshner (Ray Milland). Kirshner is bound to a wheelchair and dying of some unspecified illness, probably syphilis. He is also the founder of the Kirshner Transplant Foundation, specializing in well…organ transplants. But his more unorthodox experiments take place in a private laboratory in the basement of his home. There he has been trying to find a way to graft an individual's head onto a separate body. He's been experimenting with a gorilla which he keeps caged up in the lab. Now for the process to work, the surrogate head has to be placed side by side with the original head. After thirty-eight days the original head can be removed and with a mild spinal shift, the second head can command the new body. So we have this two-headed gorilla bouncing around in his cage. Kirshner and his aides, Dr. Thomas and Dr. Phil Desmond prep the monkey for an injection. Thomas pokes the thing in the ass with a needle and the monkey goes bananas. He overturns his cage and breaks free. Knocking Kirshner out of his wheelchair, the gorilla lopes up the stairs, out of the house and down the streets of Akersfield, California. The doctors chase him across town and finally find him in the middle of the Sunrise market, where the simian is sitting back on his ass eating two bananas (one for each mouth). They take him back to the lab and hope to God that nobody in Akersfield was completely freaked out by the sight of a two-headed gorilla. Kirshner goes to the Foundation to interview a new transplant specialist that has just been hired to his staff. To his dismay, he discovers that Dr. Fred Williams is……(whispers)…a Negro…(Shhhhhh). Kirshner is adamant about not having any black people on his staff. The other doctors try and cajole Kirshner by indicating that Dr. Williams is the best doctor in his field of study. Williams is pretty pissed off as well, and yells at Kirshner for his ignorance. But Kirshner's mind is made up. Later on, back at the private lab, Kirshner and his team perform the final stage of the transplant on the gorilla. They remove the original head, and shift the secondary head to the left so that it would be in correct proportion to the rest of the spinal column. Success! We now have an old monkey in a brand new body! Or is that…a new monkey in an old body? I can never be sure. Kirshner is pretty happy, because he now intends to perform such an operation on himself so that he doesn't have to suffer with living with an inadequate body. But Kirshner's joy is fleeting as he suffers some kind of an attack and slips into a coma. Dr. Thomas and Dr. Desmond examine him and diagnose that he only has one day to live if they cannot find a body donor in time. So they decide to appeal to the deputy governor. The guv tells them that he will canvas the prisons for death row inmates who may volunteer to take part in this experimentally fatal process. Here's where we meet Jack Moss (Rosey Grier). Jack Moss has been sent to death row for the crime of murder. To the very end he proclaims his innocence citing that the murder was actually committed by an ex-friend of his named Willie Thompson. Just as the warden is strapping Jack in to the electric chair, Jack decides to accept the Kirshner Foundation's offer. However, he only knows that he will be donating his body to science, and that he will not live beyond 38 days. He does not know the exact details of the process. Oh yeah…it's also worth noting that Jack Moss is a black guy. Dr. Desmond takes him back to the laboratory and performs the experiment. He removes the unconscious head of Dr. Kirshner from his disease-ridden body and grafts it to the left side of Jack Moss's head. When Kirshner awakens, he realizes that he is now part Nubian and loses his freaking mind. To make matters worse, Dr. Desmond decides to invite Dr. Williams over to the house. Despite the fact that Williams is black, Desmond hopes that he will overlook his boss' bigotry and agree to work with the team. Williams is not too happy about the idea, but when he sees that the patient in question is a two-headed monster, he figures that this could be a guy he can work with. They arrange to have some police brought over to secure the house in case Moss' body decides to start trouble. At this stage of the game, Moss is in complete control of the body's functions and it will be a few days before Kirshner will be able to exorcise any kind of personal motor function with Moss' body. Moss wakes up and is likewise a little perturbed by the notion of having some ugly white dude's head sitting up on his shoulder. But all in all, he takes it rather well. Hell, it beats having your ass shot up with 50,000 volts of electricity doesn't it? He manages to reach over to the operating table and snag a needle. As a nurse leans over him, Moss jabs the needle into her ass much the same way that Dr. Thomas did to the gorilla a few days earlier. By the way, we never see the gorilla again. I assume they sent him off to the zoo or something. Shame really…I would've like to have seen a sequel starring a two-headed gorilla. Anyway, the nurse falls over and Moss makes a break for it. Bursting out of the lab into the main house, Moss confronts a few of the hired guards. Now these guys didn't really know what it was they were guarding, so they are a bit put off at seeing a huge black dude with a white zit on his shoulder. He easily tosses them around and manages to steal a gun from one of the felled cops. Racing downstairs, he holds the entire house staff at bay. Seeing Dr. Williams, he takes him hostage and forces him to be the getaway driver as he fights for freedom. The Kirshner head meanwhile is awake by this point and keeps yammering back and forth calling Moss a black bastard. Hopping into Williams's car, they force the guy at gunpoint to drive them away from the house. Dr. Desmond calls the police while sending out his own staff to try and track them down. Now the police department in Akersfield is completely incompetent, as they cannot even apprehend one escaped felon - I don't care how many heads the chap is sporting. Cop cars go zinging around and flying ass over elbows into ditches and ravines and the like. Moss/Kirshner and Williams eventually ditch the Ford POS and abscond with some kids motorbike. Now this is where the shit gets really funny. They blast through a motorcross track jumping over hills and ramps and all that other fun stuff. Truly, try to imagine it. You're some young red-haired freckle faced kid out kicking up the dirt in your Suki when all of a sudden you are blindsided by a big two-headed freak, with a doctor riding shotgun on a rice-burner that doesn't look like it could even begin to support its own weight. Pretty fucking funny eh? The other bikers get distracted by the oddity and begin falling by the wayside. Moss takes the bike out of the motorcross pit and heads off into the countryside. By now the entire state police have been called out, but they're about as useless as a shit sandwich. Again, they try to capture the runaway Freakshow, but to no avail. Finally, Moss decides to take Williams to the house of his old girlfriend Lila. Lila had been helping Moss with trying to prove his innocence. Williams eventually agrees to voluntarily help them so long as Moss agrees to not point a gun at him. Kirshner cracks off some comment about, "You're kind always stick together don't they?" Williams tells Moss that he can remove Kirshner's head with just a few random medical instruments, but he will need to obtain specific chemicals first. They can't go back to the lab or the foundation as there will obviously be some more bumbling police officers there. Williams and Moss break into some chemical depot in order to steal the chemicals they need to safely separate Kirshner's head. Now this pisses Kirshner off to no end, as they will effectively be killing him. By this point, Kirshner's influence has proven strong enough that he begins to exhort some physical control over his co-opted body. Manipulating Moss's arm, he punches Williams down to the ground and then turns the fist on Moss knocking him out. He steals Williams' car and heads back to the mansion lab. Ironically, the dumbfuck cops are not there to stop him. Big surprise. He sets himself down on the lab table and prepares to sever Moss's head thereby claiming sole ownership of the body without even providing a bill of sale. But Williams revives in time to get to the house and stop Kirshner. He performs his own operation, by removing Kirshner's head and putting it back on the life support tubes, where it is slowly dying. As there is no ready donor, it can be assumed that Kirshner dies soon after. Jack Moss is now not only free of prison, but free of Mr. Honky Head as well. Jack, Williams and Lila hop into Williams' car and drive merrily down the highway while engaging in a sing-a-long. Acting / Dialogue: Pretty standard. Nothing impressive. Rosey Grier proved to be fairly likeable as Jack Moss, but its possible that his performance is only enhanced when juxtaposed against that of the surly Dr. Kirshner. In retrospect, I'm sure Rosey would have stayed with the New York Giants had he known what great heights his acting career would have taken him to. Ray Milland on the other hand, usually plays snide insufferable fucks in just about anything he does, and this movie is no exception. There's not a lot of physical acting on his part, since he spends 10% of the movie in a wheelchair and 90% of the movie as a talking head. Don Marshall plays the part of Fred Williams, and he's something of a bitter pill to swallow. I think he tries just a little too hard at portraying the 'angry-yet-intellectually-provocative' archetype. Fortunately though, the acting isn't what I would call bad. Too many times, a film can lose any integrity it may have due to a rash of shit actors. Not that this flick has any real integrity to begin with mind you. The dialogue is nothing particularly memorable. Occasionally, the ignorance of Kirshner's racial slurs might warrant a slight chuckle, but on the whole the dialogue is fairly subdued. Gore: The only gore shown in this movie is seeing Dr. Kirshner's disembodied head resting on a steel medical table with tubes and shit running out from his neck stalk. Not very grotesque though. Very PG. Guilty Pleasures: There's a classic scene where Kirshner takes a drag off of a cigarette. Moss however exhales the smoke while trying to eat some food. He barks at Kirshner for smoking while he's eating. I also got a total kick out of the two-headed gorilla. The guy is as fake looking as fake could be, but for some reason watching him bouncing down the sidewalk in a neighborhood suburb had me laughing my ass off. The Good: On the surface, there's no escaping the colossal dumbness of such a movie. But once you scrape past the primary level of pond scum, you'll find that the bare bones plot of the movie is really not that crappy. After all, it's not like Kirshner is intending on creating a two-headed circus freak. He just wants to transplant his head onto a healthy body. The original head would ultimately be done away with. By the laws of movie science physics, this seems rather plausible. So I don't really have any trouble with the plot per se. I think the racism angle was an interesting add-on. Racism in general is not really explored in horror movies and there is something shit-giggly humorous about seeing the head of a white racist slapped on top of a black man's body. Poetic justice I suppose. I don't think director Lee Frost was really trying to drive home any sort of genuine moral lesson by including the racial undercurrent, and that's a good thing. I certainly don't look towards The Thing With Two Heads when I want to feel guilty about all the fucked up shit my honky brethren has perpetuated upon the black community for the last couple of hundred years. If I wanted to be reminded of how shitty it is to be white, I'll just watch a Martin Lawrence movie. Beaucoup props go to Rick Baker's team for crafting the faux Kirshner/Moss heads. Obviously they couldn't shove both guys into the same suit, so during the scenes where we have to watch a full-bodied monster, one of the two heads is usually asleep or not speaking. On these instances, the actor's head has been replaced by an extremely well done mock up. It's a little obvious I suppose, but that's only because the logic center of your brain forces you to realize that it HAS to be a fake head. But the FX employed here are probably one of the highlights of the film itself. Unfortunately, the craftsmanship of the faux heads is undermined by this extra-large silly looking neck brace the thing has to wear. The Thing With Two Heads is a silly, goofy, corny, wacky little experiment with no real purpose other than to give you a chuckle at the drive-in as you try to get to third base with the cute little cheerleader you picked up in the schoolyard. The Bad: Once again, we have a movie that can't really decide what it truly wants to be. I can't very well consider it a bonafide horror flick as its not even remotely scary. It tackles a serious subject matter like racism, and yet, I cannot even slightly take this movie seriously. And its not quite comedic enough to be considered a comedy. Which is a real loss, since there was an ocean of comedic potential with this project. If this were my movie, I would have really played up the campier moments. The motor cross escapade alone could have been extremely funny, rather than simply moderately droll. As it stands, I feel like I'm watching an episode of the Dukes Of Hazzard. This is the kind of shit I think would have been better handled by the Troma crew. They got the true gift of vision when it comes towards crafting a hilariously campy yet entertaining splatter-flick. I also would have (pardon the term) gotten a bit racier when it came to Kirshner's diatribes. As it stands, we almost feel sorry for him because he's simply an old timer, too set in his ways to accept change, who should be pitied rather than reviled. What? What kind of wussy-ass shit is that? The guy's a prick! If Lee Frost REALLY wanted to draw a parallel between racism in America, he should've pulled out all the stops and had Kirshner slinging racial epithets at every given turn. He's the VILLAIN after all. We don't have to sympathize with him or merely roll our eyes whenever he says something nasty. We're supposed to hate him with every fiber of our being, right? This is 1972 for fuck's sake. Racial intolerance was hella-worse back then than it is today. I think Frost really pussied out when he actually could have constructed something a bit more thematic. But then, if he had done that, I would be back at square one crying in my café mocha latte feeling guilty for being a peckerwood. So never mind. Whether you think Frost was holding back on a potential gold mine, or whether you feel that he's spinning around in his own drool, there's no denying the fact that The Thing With Two Heads is a dumb fucking monster movie. Sure, it can be a lot of fun. But I think the flick really shot its load after it 86'd the two-headed gorilla. Now THERE was a guy who was going places. The Thing With Two Heads serves as a healthy reminder of why just about everything that was ever spawned by the decade of decadence known as the 1970's irrefutably sucks. So when you're scrolling through the cable stations at 4:00 am on Thursday evening, you may want to give this double header a pass. Great Lines: "Stop the car ya black bastard!" -Kirshner to Moss. "Harry, stick your head out the window and see if any more is comin'." - One cop speaking to another after a car has fallen into a ravine on top of their own car. "Do you have two of anything else?" -Lila to Jack. "Murderer? You the murderer trying to cut off my head!" "That's different!" -A humorous exchange between Kirshner and Moss. Overall Rating: Propriety demands that I only award this movie with 2 severed heads. It's not really shitty enough to warrant a 2, but I can't pass up the joke. Two heads. Two-headed monster. Get it? YA GET IT? It's a fucking joke! Laugh fuckers laugh! |
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