Elvis vs the Body Snatchers

 

In late 1978, a remake of the classic science fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers was defying expectations. The movie, which starred Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, was a box office hit and to some degree helped legitimize the remake in cinema. The tense and paranoid film overshadowed the movie on which it was based, which came out in 1956- the same year Elvis Aaron Presley released his first full length album with RCA Victor. The year before the term "body snatchers" came back into the cultural fore in reference to aliens, Elvis had allegedly passed away- and contended with some all-too terrestrial body snatchers of his own.

Clipping passed along to me by the one-and-only Tim Binnall, who insisted I do a deep dive on it...

The broad strokes of the story, as presented in the above clipping, raise a few questions- even the headline seems dubious, in its presentation of the "police claim". One wonders about the identity of the arrested men, and that of the informant; further, how any of them had expected to pull off such a scheme. In looking for answers, the saga of Elvis vs the Body Snatchers can either become a sprawling, mind-bending web of conspiracy or it can simply be the machinations of a few hackneyed criminals and their tall tales. Our narrators are unreliable, our facts are unsatisfying. All of it is, however, very interesting.

The story begins on August 16th, 1977, when news broke about the death of the King. He had apparently died while reading a book about the Shroud of Turin in Graceland, his Memphis estate. Theories about his death being faked began almost immediately afterward, while those presumably more accepting of reported facts were already angling to cash in on the rock star's death. After a funeral he was interred at Forest Hills Cemetery, in a copper coffin inside a mausoleum. The men were arrested for the attempting corpse-napping on August 28th, and by October 4th the charges were dropped in favor of a lesser charge of trespassing. What happened in the gaps of this timeline depend on whom you wish to believe. Those charged were Ronnie Lee Adkins, Bruce Nelson, and Raymond "Bubba" Green- all crooks between the ages of 25 and 30. The fourth man, mentioned in the article as having been arrested at the hospital, seems to have been released without charges. Nelson seems to have been an accomplice. Adkins and Green then will be our star unreliable witnesses.

Ronnie Lee Adkins played the role of the police informant who tipped off the cops. Within a week and a half of the arrests, his credibility was called into question with the police telling the press that the bodysnatching attempt was little more than an elaborate hoax. They had previously considered him reliable enough as an informant, and had helped Memphis law enforcement bust low level offenders over the course of a few years in exchange for reduced time at a penal colony, where he had been held on burglary convictions. Just how much the police had been strung along on Adkins' bogus claim, as they characterized it, is unclear- but by Ronnie Lee's account, which was published in newspapers at the time, the police had encouraged him to go along with the plot in order to catch the ghoulish crooks involved. Adkins spins a yarn about a mysterious man who had offered $40,000 to the four men in exchange for Elvis's coffin and remains; this was to be ransomed back to the Presley family for $10 million. This part wouldn't involve the body snatchers. Initially, Adkins claimed, the plot was to steal the remains of the King from the funeral home prior to the service at Graceland. In cooperation with police, he allegedly entered the funeral home and hot-wired a hearse; Green and Nelson were supposed to take it from there. Both being criminals out on bond, however, they were spooked by a squad car in the area and got cold feet at the last minute. This meant they would have to wait, and dig up Presley later.

In the days that followed, Adkins claims to have been in contact with both Nelson and a police sergeant named Hester. Nelson and Green were happy to learn that Elvis would be interred in a mausoleum, and not buried, as this would make the job similar to their familiar pastime of burglary and less like grave robbing. Their first attempt was on Saturday, August 27, but the crooks were once again hesitant when they spotted Sgt. Hester's unmarked car. On the night of the 28th, in Adkins' car with plates stolen from another vehicle, a trunk full of tools and a shotgun, the trio ventured back to Forest Hills for their crime. The plan was to break into the mausoleum, pull out the coffin, remove Elvis into a body bag, and hit the road. They would then meet their benefactor at a nearby Armour Packing Plant at 2 a.m. for the hand-off. Before they could get into the crypt, the gang panicked and ran, having heard police radio chatter nearby. A brief high speed chase led to a roadblock, where Green and Nelson were arrested in one car and Adkins was brought to another; he was subsequently bailed out by Hester and told he had done a fine job.

This version of events was published in newspapers alongside the official statement from Memphis Police Director E. Winslow Chapman, who presented the idea that the entire plot had been a hoax perpetuated by Adkins. Even if, he said, they had planned on bodysnatching he doubted it would have gone very far. All inquiries from the press were directed to him, and all other law enforcement personnel were instructed to stay quiet on the matter. Chapman suggested there was no evidence of an attempt to break into the crypt, because the men had no tools- although Adkins claimed that there were tools, and a gun, which had been confiscated by the cops. He had seen them himself. Charges were eventually dropped in early October, with the missing tools playing a large role. Adkins' reliability as both an informant and a witness was torpedoed a few days prior to the dismissal, when he went to a hospital and claimed to be a police officer himself in order to use city police insurance. He was then arrested for fraud, while Green and Nelson got lesser penalties for trespassing along with their pre-existing bail agreements.

It has all the trappings of a bizarre conspiracy, as though Adkins was some manner of patsy in a weird and pointless scheme. This, however, is only the case if you believe what he said. Director Chapman confirmed that he had been a reliable informant up until this caper, but everything else about his account is without corroboration. A look at where Ronnie Lee pops up in the news after the whole affair gives a clearer perspective of the man, and lends credence to Chapman's assessment. 

A 1981 article in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, for instance, identifies Adkins as an assistant to Timothy Snider, the head of the Memphis klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Snider had been charged with kidnapping a former klansman along with another man. Adkins denies holding an official post in the organization, but is quoted as saying he was a "supporter of the Klan." The article goes on to describe his arrest record, which included over 20 arrests of petty crimes such as theft and fraudulent checks. He appears as well in a book called The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by William F. Pepper. The controversial author's claims in the book which is reviewed here by Martin Hay, include statements made by Adkins, who apparently also used the alias Ron Tyler. The elaborate story he tells Pepper involves his father, Russel Adkins, who he claims was a 32nd degree Mason and a high-ranking klansman with powerful friends and a job as a fixer and hitman. If we're to believe Adkins here, his dear old man had a direct line to Deputy Director Clyde Tolson of the FBI, who worked directly under J. Edgar Hoover. Reverend Doctor King's assassination had been in the works for years before it actually happened, according to Ronnie, with the orders coming from the very top- he further says that as early as 1956, when Invasion of the Body Snatchers was thrilling teens along with Elvis's eponymous debut album, the FBI man Tolson had handed a list to the senior Adkins scumbag containing the names JFK, RFK, and MLK, insinuating that all three assassinations were part of the same plan. Having died before getting the chance to shoot Dr. King, Russel's duties got passed down to Ronnie which, one assumes, is how such things work. Ronnie Lee claims to have delivered the rifle to the gunman who shot MLK, at the age of 16 no less, and, according to him, it was not James Earl Ray. For more details on the insanity of these claims, the reader is encouraged to read the linked book review...

The final tragic nail in the coffin, as it were, for Adkin's credibility comes in 1992 when his mother was gunned down, and either his own children or nieces and nephews of his were injured. It seems Adkins had been given money to bail out a Memphis woman who was being held on drug charges, but the bail was never posted. Presumably, Adkins pocketed the money and his own mother paid the ultimate price for it.  

This is all to say that perhaps it isn't wise at all to trust his account of the attempted bodysnatching. The yarns he spins would have you going down all manner of ugly rabbit holes, which can be tempting but is from the outset obviously fruitless. A simple crook and stool pigeon for the Memphis PD, whose story constellates outward to include secret societies, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, along with government involvement and cover-ups is a familiar and well-trodden path in the zeitgeist of the late 20th century. Not to mention the synchromystic connections, with the King of Rock and Roll, Martin Luther King, and the "Camelot" dynasty of the Kennedys, which all are tangential to paranoid screeds like King Kill 33. This writer draws the line here, as this well trodden path is also laden with horseshit. It was tempting to draw a line between the American Memphis and its namesake in Egypt, where the body of Alexander the Great was once interred, before being removed a generation later to Macedonia and reburied in a now unknown location; and perhaps its worth mentioning, as we include Egyptian burial rites alongside Elvis and JFK; the absurdity of it all is exemplified by this combination in the form of the movie Bubba Ho-Tep. That is to say, the purely batshit logic one employs to construct a narrative around such claims can be fun, but at the end of the day is still batshit.

The present writer would be remiss in at not at least mentioning one of his favorite movies

This brings us, in a circuitous fashion, back to another Bubba- Ray "Bubba" Green, who in recent years came out with his own version of events for a short documentary called The Man Who Dared to Steal the King. In this scenario, Ronnie Lee Adkins was little more than an acquaintance and the wheel-man for the caper who ratted on Green, Nelson, and the fourth man who he only refers to as "Mike". In Green's telling of the story, it was he who was charged with the duty of stealing Elvis's remains and was linked up with the mystery man behind the plot through his bail bondsman, Barron Blue. The characters certainly don't get more colorful than this, especially because the "yankee" who put up the money for the scheme gets referred to as "Mr. Cincinnati". Meeting in a dimly lit Tiki bar, Green was patted down and made to surrender his butterfly knife before the meeting. Mr. Cincinnati had two briefcases with him; one was filled with money, and the other detailed maps, arial photos, diagrams and other useful information related to Elvis's would-be-final resting place. The deal was for two million dollars; Green would need to recruit three men, pay them whatever he liked, and deliver the body to be ransomed for ten million. Green seems proud of himself in the documentary for the line "My own mother ain't safe for two million", which eerily harkens back to the fate of Adkins' mom. Green never mentions any plans for the funeral home, but he does account for the tools- "Mike" was waiting on the other side of the cemetery in a stolen appliance truck containing them, and got away, never to be seen again, well before things went haywire in the graveyard. 

Green credits his lawyer with the reduced charge, as Adkins was allegedly made to commit insurance fraud under threat of bodily harm from Green and Nelson at his attorney's suggestion. The case was thrown out with Adkins' flagrant unreliability as a con artist, and while Green was still in trouble he was looking at a much smaller sentence.

The story again begins to inflate with wildness as only an ex-con can deliver. Green goes on to explain that while in prison he met a Cape Cod mobster he calls "Moose", who let him in on some secrets related to Presley. In a narrative that will sound familiar to any enthusiasts of "Elvis is Alive" theories, or anyone who read the National Enquirer a lot back in the day, Moose explained that at Elvis's funeral was seen to sweat in the coffin. "Wax sweats," says Green, "dead bodies don't." 

Moose spins a tale to Bubba, or so we're told, that Elvis was beholden to the mob during his Vegas days and had been convinced to transport large sums of cash using his personal jet for them. This didn't sit well with the King, as Elvis had always thought of himself as the Good Guy and had tried to ingratiate himself with law enforcement at every opportunity. So, the story goes, Elvis made note of the serial numbers on the bills he transported and tipped off the feds, leading to arrests in the upper echelon of the underworld. 

Elvis meeting Nixon in order to become an honorary agent of the DEA

So, in Green's telling of events, Elvis didn't die at all. He was being sent to steal a wax dummy out of the mausoleum, for purposes unknown. Elvis presumably would be in hiding, from either the mob, the feds, or both. Elvis's remains, along with those of his mother, were interred at Graceland following the events at Forest Hills. The documentary seems to suggest that the whole point of the alleged attempted body snatch was to justify the move- but why such an elaborate scheme? It does bear the hallmarks, as previously mentioned, of a patsy arrangement. That Mr. Cincinnati had $2 million to burn on some low-level druggie and crook, who obviously wasn't very good at crime since he kept getting caught, in the hopes that he'd deliver the goods; that this mystery man hoped he could recoup $8 million at the end of it all boggles the mind and invites further questions. The idea that Vernon Presley and / or Colonel Parker would need some convoluted scheme to bury Elvis where they wanted to seems equally absurd, given the outrageous amount of money, sway, and sympathy they had in the wake of Presley's death. 

The brief documentary featuring Green's story ends with a screen of text, listing some of his crimes- which include manslaughter- and state that his current whereabouts are unknown. 

If we are to try that old, well-trodden and shit-strewn path of building an unbelievable narrative here, we might suggest that the Bubba Green in the documentary isn't the man who got away with attempted corpse-napping in 1977. We could also speculate wildly about the identity of Mr. Cincinnati, or be more sympathetic to the bizarre claims of the klansman con artist who almost literally threw his own mother under the bus. We might just as easily believe the characters involved were actually pod people, having replicated and displaced their original forms. Perhaps there was a rogue mummy involved, and Elvis is still out there, on the lam.

"Elvis is out there, I tell you! He's out there!"

As with seemingly everything around Elvis, there are so many divergent narratives that finding the truth of the matter often means settling for the most boring story. Like the final resting place of Alexander the Great, perhaps some things will never be known. We have "official stories" for a lot of these tales of intrigue, and for those who enjoy tugging on the conspiratorial threads there will never be a satisfactory explanation. In this case, with either unreliable narrators or authorities who brush the crime off as a hoax we may never know what really drove the miscreants to attempt the crime and you know... that's alright, mama. That's alright with me. 

Complete Head Transplantation - a Pop-Culture Odyssey of Mad Science

 

Mad science takes many forms, both in real-life and in fiction. The classic mad scientist is typified by Dr. Frankenstein, in particular the version of the character from Universal Studios' 1931 Frankenstein - so much so that the name has become archetypal in its application. In the 1931 movie, and notably absent from the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, there is a well-known plot point about a stolen brain being implanted into the creature on Frankenstein's slab. This plays heavily into how things go awry for the young doctor, and from the horror of the monster's ensuing rampage through several sequels and adaptations comes many imitators. The brain transplantation trope occurs frequently, with many variations, over the decades in horror and science fiction stories, as does reanimation of the dead. Our focus for today, however, is that most niche of mad science properties- the complete transplantation of a human head.

The concept of full head transplantation precedes the fictional examples, even occurring prior to the aforementioned Frankenstein. In 1908, Dr. Charles Claude Guthrie successfully grafted the head of a dog onto the neck of another dog. Such an experiment was repeated in 1950s Russia by Dr. Vladimir Demikhov, and further such surgeries were attempted by Robert J. White on monkeys. Video can be found of Demikhov's experiments on YouTube, but as a word of warning they are not for the faint of heart. Getting too deeply into the specific implications of historical head transplantation is a bit grim for our purposes here, and it is perhaps enough to note that the over-the-top movie trope has some basis in fact. Modern respectable doctors scoff at the ethical and practical impediments inherent in such operations, while as recently as 2015 announced plans for attempts at human head transplantation made the news. It is worth bearing in mind that life-saving advances in medical procedure were the goal with many of these experiments, and have led to organ transplantation techniques which are commonplace now. Derided by the press and by "anti-vivisectionists", largely due to specious reporting that Guthrie had grafted the head of a cat onto a dog, he perhaps never received credit that was due to him. His 1908 success in creating a two-headed dog was in partnership with Dr. Alexis Carrel, with the goal of furthering our understanding of connecting arteries, nerves and tissue. Carrel would go on to receive a Nobel Prize, and author a book called L'Homme, cet inconnu (Man, the Unknown). There is much more to say regarding Carrel's association with supernatural beliefs, with eugenics, and the complicated history and ethics of medical experiments; but such is beyond the scope of this essay, and would only constitute dawdling on the shores of our proverbial Ithaca instead of charting the waters of our pop-culture Odyssey.

As a bonus mad science tidbit- Dr. Carrel is noted here for keeping a chicken heart alive in isolation. This inspired a horror story on the popular radio program Lights Out!

The experiments of Demikhov in particular likely inspired the late 1950s trend of head transplantation movies, but a much earlier such piece of fiction was published in Russia in 1925. Professor Dowell's Head, written by Alexander Belyaev, contains several plot elements that we will explore in movies such as The Head (1957). Not published in English until 1980, it's unclear whether it influenced American filmmakers prior to its translation. Described as a Kafkaesque version of Frankenstein, the plot involves a nefarious Dr. Kern removing the head of the titular character and secretly keeping it alive in order to force scientific knowledge from him. He goes on to transplant the head of one woman in place of another. Whether the story influenced the films in this post is unknown, and one wonders if Dr. Demikhov had read it in his native language. It did however inspire an adaptation for Japanese television in 1979, a Russian movie version called Professor Dowell's Testament in 1984, and a Chinese movie called The Head in the House in 1989.

As alluded to earlier, the Golden Age (as it were) of our incredibly niche focus today was in the late fifties. Beginning with a British film called The Man Without a Body in 1957, we are treated to a tale of an unscrupulous wealthy businessman who realizes he is dying from a brain tumor. His only chance for survival is to visit the lab of Dr. Phil Merrit, and possibly receive a brain transplant. Here we see a flaw already in the plot that never seems to be addressed- should Brussard the oil baron's brain be replaced how could it still be said to be him? The literally mind-bending proposal leads one to wonder where the Self is, what constitutes the person. The characters in the movie seem unperturbed by this foundational error. At any rate, Brussard visits Madame Tussod's Wax Museum and learns of the prophet Nostradamus. He decides that only the brain of the great prognosticator is worthy of his skull, and arranges to have the actual head of Nostradamus brought to Merrit's lab to be reanimated. Though the plot of the story hinges more on the (nonsensical) transplantation of a brain, more than a full head, it's included here for the amount of time the reanimated Nostramus's noggin spends on a plate, reanimated against his will. Merrit's lab is an impressive set for the time, with an array of isolated organs hooked up to machines, a lone monkey head kept alive by equipment, and a single living eye suspended in the background.

The pace of the movie is fairly slow, and the flaws in the story could have been more entertaining had they been more flamboyant in their presentation. For instance, Brussard is an old man dying of brain cancer, but still manages to bully the two young doctors and even murder a few people. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the doctor and his assistant to put up with him at all, and it's eventually the Head of Nostradamus that does him in by giving him bad financial advice.

A much more fun and very stylized head transplantation movie came from West Germany in 1959, and released in 1961 in the United States as The Head. (The original German title was Die Nackte und der Satan, or The Naked and Satan. At the risk of spoiling things the American title much more accurately describes the film.) Much like in Professor Dowell's Head, we have an interloping devious young scientist who keeps the head of another doctor alive. This doctor, named Dr. Abel, dies of a heart attack and in being kept conscious in a serum transfusion set-up as a disembodied head is forced by the sadistic Dr. Ood to bear witness to further transplantations. 

 Notably, the film features a dog's head being kept alive through this transfusion process, echoing the real life examples mentioned earlier. One hopes that Ood cleaned the equipment properly before attaching poor Dr. Abel's head to the same device. The sexuality of the original title arrives in the plot as Ood attempts to find a suitable body to transplant the head of his hunchbacked female assistant to- and leads him to find an unwitting donor in the form of a stripper he murders. He sets up his assistant's headless body to look like an accidental death on the railroad tracks. The Head is more horrific and menacing, and more stylized than The Man Without a Body. It is 1950s sci-fi schlock, but it has a certain charm and, for what it's worth, less plot holes than the aforementioned film. It also holds a lot of similarities to our next film, the first American entry- the iconic and well-known The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Finished in 1959, it wasn't released until 1962. Errors in the copyright notices led to it falling into public domain, which might explain why it is the only movie we're discussing today that got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. (The MST3k episode for The Brain That Wouldn't Die is notable as the first episode with Mike Nelson on the Satellite of Love in place of Joel.)

The mad doctor in this one, Dr. Bill Cortner, is an unlikeable upstart from his first scene where he badgers his father for not "playing the game" correctly. By this he means that ethics around experimentation in medicine only hinder the advancement of the science, and that he should be free to tinker as he wishes. He's almost too realistic as a sociopathic rich kid who only gets away with his behavior because of his tenured father. He never seems to emote in any way other than irritation, and is singularly focused on his new methods of grafting, transplanting, and growing flesh. His failures are evident with his lab assistant, for whom he has transplanted a hand which withered due to rejection- and also by the hulking monster in the closet, which he inadvertently created. Despite his many flaws, he has a fiancee named Jan who is eager to spend time with him.

He brings her along to his secret lab, and manages to crash their convertible on the way. Jan is decapitated, and, thinking quickly (unencumbered by human emotion) Cortner retrieves her head. Back at his country estate, and with the help of his disabled assistant, he stabilizes Jan's head and keeps it alive with the by-now-familiar transfusion process. The laboratory set in this film is perhaps the best of the bunch; Virginia Leith as Jan is magnetic as a disembodied head. Naturally, she isn't happy about this state of affairs, and pleads with Cortner to let her die. Never one to listen to reason or be bothered by moral quandary, Bill instead sets out to find a new body- and much like in The Head, he seeks out a dancer for his needed material. The Brain That Wouldn't Die hits the right notes of absurdity to be thoroughly entertaining as a B-Movie. The monster in the closet is a great bonus element that helps to achieve the ramped-up unreality of the film, and if that wasn't enough Jan's ability to telepathically communicate with it- which eventually secures her delivery from life in the pan- makes it a classic of the genre. Incidentally, our real-life Dr. Carrel promoted the idea of telepathy in his time as well...

About a decade would pass before our two final entries arrived. Often confused with each other, the trend in the early 70s tended toward two heads on one body. This mirrors our real-life examples of Guthrie and Demikhov, but can also happen naturally. It's not uncommon for reptiles to have more than one head; examples are often found of turtles or snakes with such a condition to live healthy lives with such a condition. In mammals, it usually leads to a very brief life- but there are exceptions. A cat named Frankenlouie (or Frank and Louie) lived a full fifteen years in Massachusetts, with the "janus face" condition of diprosopus. While one could argue this is really more a case of two faces, and not two heads, it was reported that each seemed to behave independently.

In human beings, conjoined twins can sometimes appear as a two-headed person, as is the case with reality TV twins Abby and Brittany Hensel. A very rare type of undeveloped conjoined twin known as craniopagus parasiticus involves twins attached at the head, for whom only one has developed a body. Each head having its own brain, which requires quite a bit of work from the heart pumping fluids, usually leads to death in these cases. One of the heads needs to be removed for survival to be possible, and the risks of such surgery on an infant increase the mortality rate. It is perhaps worthwhile to consider this as we venture into the seventies for our double feature of double-headed transplant movies.

As previously mentioned, these two movies often get confused- and for good reason. Both were released within a year of each other (and both from American International Pictures), and have similar titles. The major difference between the two movies is that one is really pretty entertaining and well-made, and the other is The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. The latter features our most subdued mad scientist yet, played by a young Bruce Dern, who claims he was never paid for the role. To be fair, he did little to earn it. His wife, played by "Marylin Munster #2" Pat Price, is frustrated at the amount of time Dern's Dr. Girard spends in his lab with his many two-headed animals. The menagerie in his lab is a highlight, and gains the movie a few points for effort. That and the interesting casting choices, including also Casey Kasem, are bright points in a movie with terrible cinematography, editing, and sound design. The opening theme is laughably Bacharach-esque, and the rest of the score is unmastered psychedelic noise. The titular transplant comes as a result of an escaped, incredibly violent mental patient who kills Girard's caretaker and maims himself- leaving the hulking giant of the caretaker's grown but brain-damaged son an orphan. Saving the lunatic, Girard grafts his head to the giant Danny's bulk which for some reason doesn't go well.

In contrast, 1972's The Thing With Two Heads is full of action, dynamic performances from its lead actors Ray Milland and Rosey Grier, and a soundtrack that is funky as hell. Like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, it leans into the absurdity and faithfully executes it as a serious movie. Instead of having a monster or telepathy involved, it instead brings in the flavor of Blaxploitation cinema- with the head of a racist old surgeon grafted to the body of a black death row convict in a desperate bid to save his life. Milland, as the bigoted Dr. Kirshner, had previously appeared in the excellent The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, while Rosey Grier as an innocent man who goes from the frying pan of death row to the fire of an extra head has an incredibly interesting life and career. He was an athlete, actor, former bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy (responsible for wrestling the gun away from Sirhan Sirhan after the assassination), and a promoter of hobbies not normally associated with men. 

Grier's character, Jack, agrees to be a test subject for a thirty-day period in a medical experiment that will ultimately kill him- but, as he sees it, it will buy him time to be pardoned as a wrongfully convicted murderer. He isn't told that the experiment involved the grafting of Milland's head onto his shoulder, with the eventual plan of removing his own. Milland simultaneously is unaware that his new body would be that of an African American, and is similarly displeased. The bulk of the movie is the chase scene in the middle, as Jack escapes and kidnaps the one black doctor who Kirshner unwittingly hired for the getaway. Riding around on a dirtbike with the police in hot pursuit, an impressive 14 cruisers are destroyed, bringing the chase action to near Blues Brothers heights of destruction. It might be the best movie of the bunch, or at least equal to The Brain That Wouldn't Die. In an admittedly bad genre of bad movie, it stands heads and shoulder above the rest.

While it doesn't have the same kind of monster-in-a-closet that ...Brain That Wouldn't Die did, it does feature a two-headed gorilla which also escapes early on. The actor for the fine man-in-a-monkey-suit action is credited as Rick Baker, who also did uncredited special effects and make-up for the movie. He is best known for his revolutionary practical effects in An American Werewolf in London.

Thus ends our catalogue of movies explicitly about complete head transplantation, but the impact of the idea has spread throughout culture. We find "honorable mentions" of transplanted heads in other movies, such as Re-Animator (1985)- an adaptation of the Lovecraft tale features the undying, isolated head of David Gale as Dr. Hill. Even the Martians of Tim Burton's 1996 movie Mars Attacks! get in on the action by switching the heads and bodies of Sarah Jessica Parker's character and her chihuahua. 
 
 

The trope has also been lampooned in modern cartoons, such as The Simpsons did in their second Treehouse of Horror Halloween special. Mr. Burns attempts to create the perfect worker by putting Homer's brain inside a giant robot; this fails, and through a comedy of errors he is crushed to death and his head is grafted to Homer in order to save him.

A similar fate befalls Fry and Amy on the show Futurama, making for an awkward Valentine's Day. Futurama also has a running joke of current day celebrities existing in the future as heads suspended in jars, furthering the theme.

Venture Brothers committed to the bit, as it were, by introducing (to our eyes, anyway) the elderly supervillain characters of Red Mantle and Dragoon who end up as a two-headed entity thanks to the botched kidnapping by the character Phantom Limb. In a show with a bewildering cast of characters, all of whom seem bafflingly memorable, Red Mantle and Dragoon are hilarious in adjusted to their late-in-life circumstances sharing a body. Their bickering explores some of the finer points of two brains operating from one body, whether that involves what alcoholic beverages to drink and in what order or whether they should be considered as one or two council members in their Guild. "We are two heads on one body, and that has never, ever been hip!" complains Dragoon in their inaugural episode as a stitched together pair. Much later, they pay homage to The Thing With Two Heads in a Halloween episode, with Dragoon applying blackface to be Rosey Grier.

And there we end our quest, for now. It is hoped that the above movies have been explained adequately enough that the reader doesn't have to watch them- but it is the considered opinion of the author that perhaps you should. Head transplantation is a very uncomfortable subject, and its uncanny context within the confines of cinema make it particularly poignant as a mirror to the potential horrors of materialist science. For every medical advancement, much trial and error must occur- or must it? Where do we draw the lines in such experimentation, and what level of good excuses measures of evil? It is beyond the purview of this article to answer such questions, and posing them- as, circuitously enough, these movies do- will have to be enough for now. We must, all of us, put our heads together to forge a new future with as little collateral damage as possible. The future, like an unwanted sewn-on head, rests on our collective shoulders, and it's up to us what kind of movie we make.