The Thing with Two Heads

This movie is a colossal mess, teetering between serious drama and absurd comedy, but failing spectacularly at both. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be – the serious segments are dull, and the comedic moments are more head-scratching than laugh-inducing. The premise is so hilariously stupid that it could have made for an entertaining B-movie, but it misses the mark entirely. The idea of stitching a racist doctor's head onto a burly black man's body had potential for outrageous fun, but the execution is disappointingly tame. Watching Ray Milland and Rosey Grier spend most of the movie literally stuck together, trying to deliver inane dialogue and forced jokes, is cringe-worthy. The most absurd scenes feature Grier running around with a gun, sporting a ridiculous plastic head of Milland on his shoulder, trying to escape his pursuers. The film's climax is an excruciatingly long and tedious police chase, full of choppy editing and wrecked cop cars, so bizarre it eventually led me from shaking my head in disbelief to bursting out in laughter – mostly thanks to the most incompetent police squad ever portrayed on screen. And just when you think it can't get any weirder, it wraps up with a completely out-of-the-blue rendition of "Oh Happy Day!" This movie is bad on every level, worth watching only for those who revel in discovering cinematic trash. Everyone else should steer clear! Thank god the creators didn't think of making a sequel like "The Thing with Three Heads," adding an Asian or Native American head to the mix. (12/08/2018)

The Thing with Two Heads could aspire to become a quirky cult flick, but it is strongly plagued by its absence of humour. Many descriptions of the film filed it under the genre of comedy, but in reality, it turns out to be quite the opposite. For the most part, it looks like it is meant as a serious science-fiction drama that contains only about two deliberately lighter scenes. And if you laugh at other times (namely, when Roosevelt Grier is seen running around with an artificial head on his shoulder), that was not what the creators intended. This mood inconsistency does the film a lot of harm, because the action is so sparse and stupid that the viewer soon loses interest and feels somewhat exhausted. Looking at Ray Milland and Roosevelt Grier’s gloomy and sweaty faces, it seems they had to endure a really painful shooting! The racism theme is only lightly touched upon for some reason, and there’s not much to expect from that side. Then, there’s that ridiculously excessive car chase. Maybe American International Pictures’ bosses wanted to add at least one action scene, and came up with that completely pointless and incredibly long and absurd police pursuit somewhere on a local meadow. After an hour and a half, one concludes that the plot didn’t go anywhere and that the characters didn’t evolve at all. Not mentioning the final slap in the face when you hear the gospel chant ‘Oh Happy Day’ – whaaat?! (12/26/2018)