THE INCREDIBLE 2-HEADED TRANSPLANT

1971 camp value: ***1/2

The strangest thing about the THE INCREDIBLE 2-HEADED TRANSPLANT... overshadowed by the following year's blaxploitation camp classic THE THING WITH TWO HEADS wherein football titan Rosey Grier and once Oscar-winning Ray Milland shared the larger guy's body... is that Bruce Dern, famous for playing crazy to the hilt, is, as a bonafide Mad Scientist, extremely subdued: Rarely has the actor been so calm, cool and collected.

Meanwhile, with sexy wife (and MUNSTERS babe) Pat Priest yearning for affection, Dern's Roger is just too busy trying to morph his bizarre experiment from animals to human. And everything connects in the middle from what occurred during a violent pre-credit prologue: a low-rent Warren Oates lookalike playing a psychopath is sentenced to the loony bin, eventually escapes and, after attacking the lovely blonde ingenue residing at a rural ranch/institute (our central location), he's shot, wounded and "secretly" captured by Dern and his scientist partner: thus the killer's head is transplanted onto a faithful, gigantic and sporadically reckless OF MICE AND MEN style village idiot/gardener's son, who, after dad's added to the body count, has no reason to live a normal life, so why not place a second noggin to consummate the perpetually labored, groundbreaking experiment?

Signed by Pat Priest

Here's where the film really takes off as the human creature, literally headed by the killer controlling the bodily strength of this once gentle giant, battles Nazi bikers (the toughest played by personal friend, cult actor Gary Kent) while seeking out the kind of raging, raping and recklessly pillaging havoc that makes all things exploitation, exploitation.

And, as noted earlier, while hardly as memorable or iconic as THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (which had a corny yet genuine racial/social message), TRANSPLANT wields the kind of pointlessly awesome drive-in flavor where anything can happen; and most of it does. Added to that, our eventual savior/hero is none other than Casey Kasem as a normal (as opposed to neurotic) doctor, also providing radio voice-overs as the characters, along with the audience, are given necessary exposition between bloody bouts: Making Kasem another "two-headed" entity, only not as incredible.

Screen Captures from THE INCREDIBLE 2-HEADED TRANSPLANT

Includes our leading lady scream queen played by MUNSTERS Marilyn actress Pat Priest

And the eclectic casting of Bruce Dern and the equally yet differently iconic Casey Kasem

Here's where Cult Film Freak's friend Gary Kent battles the 2-Headed beast run amok

Wide shot of the fight between real life stuntman/actor Gary Kent vs our titular creature creation

Consider inexpensively downloading Gary Kent's autobiography on Amazon's Kindle

"Sorry, Shaggy, I'm all out of Scooby-Snacks... let the bitch eat Alpo."