The Thing With Two Heads

Today I’m going to take a quick look at a b-movie classic: The Thing With Two Heads.

The Thing With Two Heads was a 1972 low budget movie that was presented by the notorious Samuel Z. Arkoff, and distributed by American International Pictures. The film’s writer/director, Lee Frost, had a long career making exploitation features, including 1975’s The Black Gestapo.

The plot of The Thing With Two Heads is summarized on IMDb as follows:

A rich but racist man is dying and hatches an elaborate scheme for transplanting his head onto another man’s body. His health deteriorates rapidly, and doctors are forced to transplant his head onto the only available candidate: a black man from death row.

The movie primarily stars Academy Award winner Ray Milland and former NFL star Roosevelt Grier as the mismatched central pair.

Effects legend and winner of many Academy Awards Rick Baker appears briefly in the film in a gorilla suit, and apparently did work on the effects as well, though without credit.

The score for The Thing With Two Heads was provided by Richard O. Ragland, who also provided music for Q: The Winged Serpent, The Touch of Satan, and Grizzly, among many others low budget features.

Nowadays, The Thing With Two Heads is regarded as an off-color cheese-ball classic of trash cinema, that certainly has a bit of a cult following. Roger Ebert gave the movie a 1-star review, and IMDb currently has it at an unenviable 4.1/10 from its user base, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared into absolute obscurity by any means.

The Thing With Two Heads is certainly a movie made for its time period. This reminded me in some ways of Bone, and in other ways of the standard field of blaxploitation movies that came out in the 1970s. However, its goofiness kind of defies classification: it is hard to call this anything other than a b-movie, though there are definitely blaxploitation elements. It isn’t what anyone would call progressive in its portrayal of race, but given the time period, it certainly could have been worse.

The movie certainly isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it has some odd value as a silly relic of its time period. For b-movie fans who can stomach lesser Roger Corman movies, The Thing With Two Heads shouldn’t be any trouble, and might be worth checking out. The effects and stunts are in particular pretty hilariously inept, which are almost worth the experience on their own.