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The Man with Two Heads (1972)

Dir: Andy Milligan

We open with a London streetwalker ("'Allo ducks") picking up the wrong punter and no bloomin' mistake!
No sooner have they gone into the trees (!) then the poor unfortunate old dear is set upon with a knife ("'Er! 'Old on, I don't go in for this rough stuff"!) and promptly gets it stuck between her heaving bosom, complete with stringy meat bits!

Next we meet Dr. William Jekyll (Denis DeMarne) who has been trying to separate the evil part in Man from the good part and has had some success, despite the criticism of his peers including the Father of his Fiancée Mary Ann (Gay Feld ), with animal subjects. As yet though he has never tested his special serum on a Human subject.
His Sister Carla (Jaqueline Lawrence) is also worried at Jekyll's workaholic lifestyle.

The body of the above opening scene's killer (who we learn was soon captured after his dirty deed) is sold to Jekyll and his assistant Jack Smithers (Berwick Kaler, "Bloodthirsty Butchers", the only Milligan actor to make it in the mainstream with frequent movie and UK TV appearances, and who here bares his arse for the cause) for use in his Medical class.
He shows his Students how the 'evil' parts of the killer's brain turn green, but with no live Human subject he finds it hard to prove his theory.

Desperate to proceed but having no animals to test it on, Jekyll injects himself with the serum
But unknown to him the formula calculations got all messed up after Smithers knocked some liquid over the papers and then attempted to re-write them…wrongly!
With a mutated serum flowing through him (and surrounded by smoke for some unknown reason) Jekyll transforms into the sadistic maniac 'Mr Blood', with truly outrageous eyebrows, who promptly goes on a rampage of rape and murder!
And if that wasn't bad enough, 'Mr Blood' starts to take control or Dr. Jekyll even without the serum…….

 

Filmed in Ye Olde England, Andy Milligan's take on Robert Louis Stevenson's famous tale 'The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde' is far more Milligan than Stevenson and has suffered under the dictatorial hands of it's Producer William Mishkin who had the film cut to get a 'PG rating and removed the original title of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Blood" and replaced it with the nonsensical "The Man with Two Heads" to cash in on the success of "The Thing with Two Heads".
But is what's left of Milligan's vision still worthwhile? Well, for the most part, yes it is.

The lack of Milligan's usual camp/acidic dialogue and overly flamboyant characters means the build-up to the main meat of the plot is not as interesting as it should have been (and usually is with Milligan's movies) and although things improve once we get into the 'Jekyll and Hyde' plot, where the film takes off with much trashy gusto, unusually for Milligan the movie still tends to plod when 'Mr Blood' is not doing his nasty thing.

The first half of the film is actually full of rather deep and serious speeches about science vs. faith, like this outburst from one of Jekyll's less than impressed Students; "You're playing with things that are no concern of yours! They belong to one supreme being, God…And God will punish you" and this delicious rant by Jekyll himself, "This thing called a soul, is a figment of Man's imagination…Man has invented this soul to help him get out of today's difficulties, to transport him to a hereafter. A hereafter that doesn't exist"!
Although overblown and mostly delivered in an amateurish way, this kind of dialogue (and there are quite a few of these morality debate moments) shows that there was more to Milligan than many people gave him credit for.
The rest of the dialogue though, once 'Mr Blood' gets on his misoganistic soapbox, is classic 'trash' Milligan! Full of venomous insults delivered with scene chewing enthusiasm by DeMarne.
'Mr Blood' starts his roaming by going to a local tavern and viciously beating up a rival for the charms of blonde tart with a heart April (Julia Stratton), who will be his unfortunate plaything throughout the movie.
He proceeds to woo April, in that lovely old fashioned way, with sweet phrases like; "Call me Daddy", "Go and wash that filthy make-up off your face, you look like a cheap little tramp" and the ever charming "You're a cheap little slut! You know that don't you? You shouldn't be allowed on the face of this Earth! You're scum! You're the defecation of the slums of London"! The old smoothie!

As Jekyll Denis DeMarne is earnest and quite bland but this only helps his histrionics shine brighter when he transforms into 'Mr Blood'
With much wicked gusto he spits out lines like "OH! Did I hurt the poor little girl? Did the bad man hurt the little girl?" and takes the utmost pleasure in reducing April to his pet dog, "Nice doggy, bark…Go on, bark"!
And knowing Milligan's often sadistic dislike of women, you can't help but imagine the smile on his face as he wrote such scenes!

There is much here to enjoy in fact as far as 'Mr Blood' is concerned and the highlights are many.
Like a fun scene where Jekyll starts to turn into Mr Blood in the middle of a lecture, suddenly blurting out "What makes you think you're a lady" to his understandably confused students, and ripping into his female student Victoria (Jennifer Sommerfield) with insults like, "Do you want us to wait for you all day because you are a poor, helpless female…We all know you should be at home looking after snot-nosed little kids! All women should be in bed…to be used"!

An astonishingly chaotic (probably not helped by the cuts) S/M orgy sequence that 'Mr Blood' joins, in a weird smoked filled room, features much mad cackling, screaming, waving arms, ripped clothes, tied up men being tortured and even the odd bit of cheesy 'n' cheap gore (like a guy with his eyes popped out shown with what looks like two bloody great snowballs stuck on his face), all filmed in a stomach churning mess of jumping, shaking, swirling camera moves.
There are hints here that much fun debauchery was originally shot by Milligan before being hacked out by Mishkin in his ludicrous quest in getting the film it's 'PG' rating.

Away from 'Mr Blood' and his shenanigans we have a delightfully bizarre sequence where Dr. Jekyll, showing that he runs a really serious medical class, instructs his pupils to dissect the body of the aforementioned killer as quickly as possible, "You may use cleavers if you wish". Cue some (sadly censored) limb removal and entrail fiddling as the students hack away in a less than medically sound fashion! It's a classic moment of completely out of the blue Milligan madness.

The whole film is of course very cheap looking, with hardly a glimmer of period authenticity, and filmed in almost continuous 'shaky cam' and of course at the finale to any violent scene Milligan employs his trademarked 'swirl camera' movement, something that we Milligan junkies have come to love, but will have novices wondering what the hell just happened to the camera guy!
There is also a huge amount of smoke and fog that blasts into many frames (at one point obscuring literally everything!) for no known reason. I guess this is Andy's recreation of those famous London smogs, but quite frankly it just looks like some silly sod was burning wet leaves too near the set!

Despite the cuts for the 'PG' rating (something it would never get today even in this form, and even then we have a blood spurting mouth and a decapitation, on top of what has already been described above) there is still quite a lot of brutality here, be it physical or verbal, and as a whole the film manages to entertain even with the unusually large amount of flat scenes and the, apart from 'Mr Blood', sadly normal (by Milligan's standards) characters.
So it's not prime Milligan madness by any means, but the 'Mr Blood' scenes (and his outrageously politically incorrect dialogue) help to ensure there is still much to savour here for Trash hounds.