The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971)

A Major Disappointment

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Watching The Incredible Two Headed Transplant and you've got to wonder just why are scientists doing things like transplanting a second head on to a body which already has one? The explanations offered just never quite satisfy on the screen.In this colossally bad classic Bruce Dern and Berry Kroeger are conducting secret experiments in body collaboration and they get a perfect opportunity when escaped maniac killer Albert Cole leaves the asylum he's been committed to and runs amuck. Oh joy, here's a great subject. So after killing the caretaker at the Dern estate, Cole's head is grafted on to the body of the caretaker's son who is a seven foot plus giant who was brain damaged at eight years of age and has that mentality.Of course after that the two headed guy runs completely amuck causing great concern to law enforcement not to mention Dern's wife Pat Priest and best friend and fellow scientist Casey Kasem. That's right disc jockey and second rate Dick Clark, Casey Kasem. And as an actor I have to say Kasem is a great disc jockey.Of course Kasem is no actor, but what did the rest of this cast think they were signing up for?

I must reveal the last line of this pretty bad movie: "Too much imagination can destroy a man, deputy." So says Casey Kasem-yes, the recently retired "King of the Countdowns" himself. Not enough, apparently, made this picture not too exciting. I mean, all the fights between the two-headed retarded man-boy/not-so-deceased rapist are clumsily staged especially between that motorcycle gang that didn't seem so tough, now did they? And what is Bruce Dern, who was just getting associated with Jack Nicholson and would eventually make movies with Alfred Hitchcock and Jane Fonda, doing here still working for AIP? At least Pat "Marilyn Munster" Priest is good for some eye candy and damsel-in-distress excitement! Oh, and besides playing a doctor, Kasem also is on the car radio reading the news. Personally, I think I would have preferred to hear him doing his recently-started "American Top 40" show here as a plug, maybe with that show's first No. 1: Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come"! And that diabetes-inducing theme song at the beginning and end just calls for an "MST3K" Joel/Mike and the bots riffing treatment! I've said enough so on that note, The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant should provide enough cheezy fun for anyone in the mood for these late night drive-in fodder.

This is not an easy one to watch, long spaces of dialog, some poor acting and not enough good campy acting, etc. I can't say I hated the movie, I did laugh at a lot of parts, but ultimately it was nothing memorable. Bruce Dern looks stoned in most his scenes and sometimes cannot be understood because he's mumbling. Casey Kasem has a surprising amount of work to do in this film compared to other films I've seen him in like "Angels Unchained". Surprisingly, he's not that bad. Unfortunately it's one of the few surprises in the film.The plot is very stale 1930s era mad scientist hokum. It's pretty sad when you have to say that "The Thing with Two Heads" is a relatively creative movie, but it's true when compared to this one. The plot is identical with "Donovan's Brain" and any number of generic mad scientist plots. Dern is a guy who has developed a technique for grafting one animal's head on another animal. DJ Kasem plays a doctor (although, oddly enough, whenever you hear a DJ on the radio in the film Kasem provides the voice for the DJ as well) who is an old college friend of Dern's, and Dern shows him his laboratory set-up with all its two headed rodents, monkeys, foxes, and rabbits, declaring his intention to soon use it on humans. Kasem seems oddly unalarmed, simply exchanging pleasantries with the wifey and Dern and promising to come up and visit at a later point in the film. The human experiment subject ends up being a brain damaged worker on Dern's ranch, whose father has just been killed by a homicidal rapist. Neither Dern nor his assistant (Berry Kroeger, who had a very suitable face kind of reminiscent of Peter Lorre's) seems to think about the fact that if they put a psychotic head on another person's body, they will simply create a psychotic monster. Didn't they ever watch "Frankenstein"? Geez! BAD BRAINS! Speaking of the psycho killer, Al Cole who I believe played him has to be one of the worst actors I've seen in a relatively "big" B movie like this. If the movie ever had any chance of working as a scary movie, Mr. Cole's unbelievably over the top performance would have ruined that. His way of communicating his lust is to literally lick his lips and bulge his eyes out. It's an embarrassing performance that could have been fixed sooner as soon as the first rushes came in, but the director either wasn't skilled enough or didn't care enough to fix the problem.This film could have benefited somewhat from having its tongue a bit more in cheek. Everyone seems very serious, which would be fine if it wasn't such a tired plot and a standard script, standard direction, etc. There's really nothing scary about the monster anyway, the only people he kills are some bikers who nobody cares about in the first place and a couple schmoozing teenagers. In a film where the horror fails and there is no camp, you have basically a wasteland which would bore 99.9% of film viewers. The only laughs here are un-intentional and they are few and far between. There isn't a lot of gore or sex exploitation either, at least not in the print I saw which was actually an archival print. So not much to recommend here. Rent the one with Rosey Grier and Ray Milland instead, unless you're a big fan of Casey Kasem or Bruce Dern and you want a few cheap laughs sprinkled through an awful film.

A maniacal killer's head is fused to the lumbering, gargantuan body of a man with the mind of a small child by a scientist who just happens to specialize in fusing two-headed creatures in his spare time. Why? He says to show everyone what a genius he is. Why on Earth would anyone want to create a monster with two heads - neither containing the brain of anything remotely resembling worthiness? Such is the premise in this bizarre, fascinating, and God awful film made in 1971. Bruce Dern plays the "mad" scientist with decided disinterest. Can you blame him? He strolls around with drink in hand and never shows any real depth of character. By the film's end, his performance just caves in. The two-headed monstrosity, which battles bikers on bikes wielding chains and has a cumulative IQ of 60, is a true sight of ineptitude to behold. John Bloom, who would later get an even worse role as Frankenstein's Monster in Al Adamson's horrendous opus Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, plays Danny - a hulking man that lost his mind when he was left for dead in a mine shaft years ago. Now an adult, Danny is dutiful to his father, is treated like a mental defective by all concerned, and sweats a lot. The head of Albert Cole, a man who we see leering or laughing with crazy glee, is attached when Cole tries to rape Dern's wife(more on her in a minute) and kills Danny's father. Dern and his limp-wristed former surgeon assistant(Barry Kroeger) feel the time is right to make a two-headed freak with the body of Cole at their disposal and the mentally deficient Danny just there. This movie is a real hoot to sit through as every minute in bad - bad but fun. The story stinks. Director Anthony Lanza has little savvy. The production values virtually non-existent(although the head thing looks better here then some of the other two--headed monsters of the same era). Acting? What acting? C'mon - Casey Kasem as a doctor/hero? Dern looks like he lost a bet and had to be in the picture. Cole is annoyingly disgusting and ridiculous. Bloom is okay at best. But I really liked Pat Priest as Dern's wife. She sure didn't give a great performance, but she made a believer out of me as she fainted(several times), ran from crazy Cole, lounged in a chair by the pool, laid in bed either of her own accord or bound and gagged, and finally was tied and put in a cage in the lab - all in either a bikini, a small nightie, or some other light attire that showcased her attributes, the brightest things about this dreadful dreck. This movie is very, very bad, and I must confess I loved every minute of it. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Just hearing that soundtrack where every beat foreshadows something suspenseful will happen and rarely does. Or how about the dialog used in the picture? Whew! This is one of the all-time great of le bad cinema.