 Hello and welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies, but before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we are drinking Slaughtered Lamb English Bitter. Alright. Today we have another fan request, Matthew Davy would like us to cover the thing with two heads from 1972. It is written and directed by Leif Frost, and he's kind of an exploitation type director. He started off with sexploitation, and then moved on to blackploitation. Ray Milanda is in this, he's a Hollywood legend really, he's been in a million things, but just a few are going to mention, frogs, the terror in the wax museum, man with the x-ray eyes, Rosie Greer is in this, the brother of famous Pam Greer. He was also in lots of TV shows, to name one McMillan and Wife, I like McMillan and Wife. He was also a pro football player, and a bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy. Ben Marshall is in this too, and he was in an original Star Trek episode, the Galileo 7. The thing with two heads starts off with one of our main characters here, Dr. Maxwell Kirschner going down to the secret lab he has in the basement to check on his experiment, and we find out that his experiment is this gorilla with two heads. We find out he's doing this experiment because he is actually planning to do this to a human at some point, himself. He is dying, and he wants to put his genius brain head on a healthy donor body. He's doing it first with the gorilla to make sure it can work, and so far the second head is taken. Now, the next part of the experiment is to get the old head off. The original head? Well transporting the gorilla in this cheap cage just sitting on top of a bed, it gets out and runs amok and starts trashing the lab, running down the street, goes to this convenience store. When he's on that brick wall, tell the guy in the suit is all trying to balance. One of the doctors tracks down the gorilla and shoots him with a tranquilizer, takes him back. Kirschner is also the head of surgery in this hospital, and he's hired a brand new brilliant surgeon, and he's meeting him for the first time. He walks in, and you can tell Kirschner is not too happy, because he's super racist. Unknowingly he hired a black surgeon, and your services are no longer needed. Yeah. Dr. Williams calls him out on it, he's like, well cuz I'm black, right? After Dr. Williams leaves, he gives his staff kinda shit for hiring this guy. Kirschner is successful in removing the old head from the gorilla, so now the gorilla has a brand new head, living properly. So now he's ready to do this experiment to himself, but he needs a donor body, and he's running out of time to find one, because he's dying, and he actually takes ill sooner than expected. It turns out that nobody can seem to find a proper donor, in the amount of time that Kirschner has left, scour the prison system, and ask death row inmates to volunteer their bodies for scientific research. One guy volunteers. I told you before, I'm an innocent man, 30 days that the experiment's gonna take is just the time I need to prove my innocence. He steps out of the car, and the doctors look at each other like, oh no, this is gonna be trouble. Jack Moss is the poor bastard who's volunteered here. When he wakes up, he's got Kirschner's head on him, and he starts freaking out. He's like, hey, what'd you guys do to me? I didn't sign on for this! I told you guys, I'm an innocent man! When Kirschner wakes up, you gotta be joking. The irony of the whole thing, he gets up and he starts to run amok too, just like that gorilla did, right? He starts freaking out, takes off, and he ends up taking Dr. Williams hostage. There's this big long chase scene that ensues, where they're trying to evade the cop cars. They also come across this big race going on with dirt bikes. One of the guys on the dirt bike sees Moss with the second head and wipes out, so they take the dirt bike and they take off, and they're just getting up over a hill and almost away, and then you see the dirt bike come back, and there's like tons of cop cars coming after them. There's like this big chase, driving into these canyons. Yeah, like where are these all these canyons, big huge holes in the ground, it's out of nowhere. There's no reason to see these cars driving in these holes. There's like these ramps that are perfect for the dirt bike to go over to. So they end up getting away, they get to Jack Moss' girlfriend's house to prove Jack's innocence, and that's where we're going to end the plot. So if you want to see what happens with Jack Moss with the head, Williams, and all the cops and the whole cast and crew, keep watching the thing with two heads. So the thing with two heads, is it trash or treasure? Let's start with the treasure first. The plot itself, right? The way that they tackle the racist issues of the day, right? By melding it with a comedy. They put an old cantankerous bastard's head, and he happens to be white, onto this sort of young black guy, right? And then you've got, he's rich, this black guy's been imprisoned unlawfully, he's innocent. A whole mishmash of what's going on at the time. Yeah. The fact that they're able to do it comedically while still saying something, pretty brilliant how they do it. Yeah. It brings it to the forefront, right? Without really cramming it down your throat, actually. The characters in this movie are fantastic. You know, we first meet Kirschner, he's this old man who's racist and grumpy, but he thinks the world of himself plays it perfectly. Yeah. You just love to hate him. The career is really good in this, and it's funny because he's kind of not good, really, but it's sort of like a yin and yang thing. They play well off of each other. The effects are good too, and they're so simple. Ray Milan's behind Rosie's career. Just always behind him. They've got that big thing, the pillow thing around, so it hides everything. And then when they show him from far away and it's some super dummy head bouncing around. But he's on that motorcycle and the head's all bouncing. Each actor has a fake head depending on which head is talking, right? During the surgery there, like when they're laying on the slab, it looks pretty good. The way they do that, where they actually take the heads off, and I thought I was really watching intently and I was like, is that fake? That's a fake head. That's a fake head. I see something moving. They must have animatronics or something. The name sounds deceiving, the thing with two heads. I thought for sure it was going to be like a 50s B Roger Coromid monster movie. Not at all. It's this legit comedy. And the comedy is legitimately funny. It's written very well, the joke's land. The whole movie is one big joke. Just the image of the thing with two heads is enough to get you, like the image is so ridiculous you can't help but laugh at it. The dialogue for the characters, the way it's written is great too. When they walk into his girlfriend's house there and she's like, you get into all kinds of shit. She shows up with an extra head. She's not even phased by that, it's like, what the hell has he done to desensitize you from shit? Then he walks into the next head and it's like, oh yeah, that's normal. He wants to get with his girlfriend there and of course she doesn't want to because he's got this old man's head on his shoulders and he turns to the cursor and goes, now you know. You got to go. It's like he didn't need to go before but now that he can't get laid he needs to go even more. The whole chasing is pretty funny too, it kind of reminds me of the Blues Brothers chase scene where it's just so epic and ridiculous where it becomes funny, like how many more cop cars are going to drive into that canyon for no reason, which brings us to the trash of this movie and that is part of it, is the pacing. Takes a long time for the thing with two heads to actually break out of the lab and start wreaking havoc on the loose and the chase scene too is a little too long, like it's ridiculously long where it's like, okay, let's wrap it up here, it's like a quarter of the movie, it's entertaining and all, but it goes a tad too long, they're probably going to shave 5, 10 minutes off, probably easily. The settings too for this movie are pretty bare bones to the point of actually being shitty, like that basement laboratory in the mansion, it doesn't really make sense in the context of the movie, like here's this rich surgeon that lives in a mansion, that's the best laboratory you can get, it's like you couldn't afford some equipment, it's just a basement with a cage in it and a couple of beakers and shit, like you still see the washing machine in the corner, it's still coming down and still doing his laundry. Of course all the big equipment, the Frankenstein type laboratory is kind of what this movie needed. The trash is the ending and kind of how abrupt the ending happens, it's just suddenly, they just wrapped it up really quick and you're like, well, where's the payoff, there isn't really much of a payoff in this movie, it's just kind of over and you're like, well that was good and all, but yeah you're left wanting more, a little more closure would be nice. Yeah, if they would have shaved like some time off that chase scene and used some of that time to pop on the end to extend the ending a little bit more, you feel more fulfilled at the end of it. Exactly, yeah. Who can watch a movie like this without mentioning the fact that the Simpsons parodied this in their Treehouse of Horrors episode, Burns transplants Homer's brain into that machine. Look at me, I'm Davey Crockett. Then the machine falls on Burns and he has to get his head transplanted onto Homer's body. I had never seen this movie until the other day and when I watched it I was like, holy fuck, that's what they're parodying, this movie. How many times you could watch the Simpsons and not even realize you're watching something that's a complete parody of something that you've never seen, then when you finally see that thing it's like, ah, no clue. They did it again. The thing with two heads, trash or treasure. It's treasure. Yeah. It's actually a really fucking good movie. Yeah, it is. For like a kind of a low budget B movie, gets a lot done, man. Yeah, it delivers a lot, right? It tackles serious subject matter without being too serious about it, it keeps it fun and funny. The movie's entertaining as hell, like you're smiling almost the whole way through because it's just so ridiculous and fun. Yeah. Until next time, keep drinking.