The Thing with Two Heads
| release date | July 19 1972 |
| studio | Saber Productions |
| director | Lee Frost |
| writer | Lee Frost (screenplay), Wes Bishop (screenplay), J |
| starring | Ray Milland, Roosevelt Grier, Don Marshall, Roger Perry, Chelsea Brown, Kathrine Baumann, John Dullaghan, John Bliss, Bruce Kimball, Jane Kellem, Lee Frost, Wes Bishop, Roger Gentry, Britt Nilsson, Rick Baker, Phil Hoover, Rod Steele, Michael Viner, Willi |
| rating | PG |
| tagline | They transplanted a white bigot's head on a soul brother's body! |
| trailer 1 | Trailer #1 |
14 Comments
The Thing With Two Heads is a campy 1970′s “blackspotation” film. The premise is simple, you have an old brilliant transplant surgeon with chest cancer, and he’s able to have his team take his healthy head and sew it onto another man’s body. The only catch is that in order for the donor body to stay alive, the original head has to stay on.
We learn early on that the surgeon, Max, is a old racist, and he doesn’t allow black people on his staff. This becomes an issue when a brilliant doctor is hired without an interview and turns up with a case of black to Max’s hospital. Max tries to fire him, but they have a contract. After the racist thing is established, and Max’s health quickly declines, it becomes obvious what’s going to happen next.
A huge black man, Jack Moss, is on death row, and as opposed to going to the death chair, he decides to “donate his body to science” while he’s still alive. Jack is an innocent man, and learns that he’s buying himself an extra 30 days to prove it. Jack is sedated and the surgery is a success! Tho when Jack wakes up he’s not happy, because he didn’t know they were stitching an old bigot’s head to his body!!
The movie is full of goofy things that they could only get away with in the age of so many crazy films like – “Blackula” “Blackenstien” and the like. They manage to do a great job making the fake heads look somewhat believable, and actually these heads look better than some films attempts years later. The film also adds about a 20 many chase scene on a dirt bike that is funny as hell, and about 50 police cars are sacrificed for a good laugh. The chase scene is also the only point in the movie where it doesn’t appear to take it’s self seriously.
I recommend this to B-Movie lovers, and anyone just wanting to find a gem from the 70′s they may not have heard of. It’s funny, it’s stupid, tho it never gets annoying, and ending credit sequence is downright hilarious. It’s a shame that Jack Moss and Max couldn’t stay together longer, I would’ve loved to see an Shaft style action series based around these guys!