“Stop jerking around. You and I are now one, dummy.”

Justin’s rating: It’s a pain in my neck

Justin’s review: Sometimes you don’t want to bother with a movie that teases you with the possibility of being good only to be let down when you see it. Sometimes you cut out the middleman by going straight to a film that is guaranteed to be terrible. This way you don’t have to court hope.

I knew what I was getting into with The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (and yes, even the title made my eye twitch by not spelling out “two”). If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m getting a review out of this, I’d be completely flushing 90 minutes of my life down the toilet.

So there’s this mad surgeon named Dr. Girard (Bruce Dern, The ‘Burbs) who is absolutely obsessed with putting second heads on things. There’s no reason for it, he just likes two heads on stuff and gets bummed that the one-headers are still in the majority.

But maybe that’ll change when Science gets a load of his latest experiment, in which he sews the head of a maniacal serial killer onto the shoulder of a brain-damaged caretaker with the help of his best friend, Casey Kasem. I guess the logic there is that these disparate minds will produce a normal, well-adjusted two-headed dude.

Oh wait, the monster’s gone insane and is now on a murder rampage. Guess you really didn’t think this through, but them’s the risks you take when you monkey in God’s domain.

Considering that 2005’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy couldn’t CGI a second head on Sam Rockwell to any convincing degree, 1971 didn’t stand a chance to pull this off. The creature is clearly a guy cuddling right behind a bigger one. Yet that didn’t bother me. We came for the two-headed transplant, we got the two-headed transplant.

And yes, it was incredible.

Did I mention that the serial killer assaulted this surgeon’s wife? And the surgeon’s thought, when he takes the killer down, isn’t to end him for good but to give him a new lease on life? And by stitching him onto the shoulder of a well-meaning simpleton whose father was just murdered by this guy?

There’s clearly no logic at play here. They started with “we want a film about a two-headed dude who goes on a rampage” and reverse-engineered the story in the most ham-fisted way possible.

What’s even more annoying is how this movie constantly flickers between scenes, often repeatedly. I guess they were trying to go for an unsettling atmosphere, but it’s jarring and contributed to a nice headache that I had cooking.

Even though the subject matter is intrinsically ridiculous, the movie doesn’t play it goofy. In fact, if it wasn’t for the visual restraint of the era, this would be a horribly grim and grisly movie. A guy gets a hoe to the head, another gets shotgunned down in broad daylight, and, y’know, the two heads thing. I counted over a dozen kills in this movie, which is far more than I expected going into it.

Probably the funniest thing is how the two surgeons never adequately explain why they keep slapping extra heads on animals and people. What did they honestly think was the best case scenario here? That these two heads would get along and become a functional member of a society that would certainly not point and shriek “OH MYLANTA WHAT IS THAT ABOMINATION!” when their creation came lumbering into a K-Mart?

Unfortunately, this silly idea can’t sustain what is otherwise a dull Frankenstein knock-off. There are some angry bikers (this was the ’70s after all) and some innocent teens, but it’s not as though this culminates in Dr. Girard collecting as many heads as he can to create a 14-headed supervillain. About the only value this film has is to boast about seeing so that everyone around you is impressed with your peculiar taste.

Intermission!

• The tagline: “This brain wants to love… this brain wants to kill!”
• I feel that if you do a forward roll through a glass window and emerge with no cuts, the cops should let you go or give you a five-minute head start
• Two-headed monkey and monkey genitals
• Danny likes swinging giant axes around for fun
• I wouldn’t drink strange milk left in a car
• Death by hoe
• Son mourning the death of his father? Better chloroform him!