My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 15): Entrapped Women

Boxing Helena (1993)

Directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch

Starring Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn

The Head that Wouldn’t Die (1962)

Directed by Joseph Green

Starring Jason Evers and Virginia Leath

Last week’s review of Dogtooth, the movie about entrapped, isolated children of controlling parents, got me thinking about other dramas of control. Of course, Shaw’s Pygmalion (then My Fair Lady) is a famous example, as Henry Higgins seeks to remake a poor girl into a society lady. Ditto Vertigo, Hitchcock’s classic drama of a man’s obsession with the idea of a woman, rather than a real woman. These excellent dramas give rise to some uncomfortable truths about how some men would rather have a fantasy partner than work with a real one. I then remembered two films that take this concept to excess.

Boxing Helena is a not-so-great movie that makes you pretty uncomfortable about sex roles, rather like Dogtooth makes you about parenting. The excellent British actor Julian Sands plays a famed surgeon with a pathetic social life. He pursues a popular and attractive woman (Sherilyn Fenn) and is rebuffed time and time again, stalking her endlessly. When she is hit by a car in front of his estate, he sees his chance, brings her battered body into his home, amputates her traumatized legs, and props her up alternatively in a wheelchair and on a stationary throne (truly a woman on a pedestal), imprisoning her and controlling her every move. This is despite her continuing scorn for him and endless cutting remarks. Sands is an excellent actor (The Killing Fields, A Room with a View), but is done in here by an overwritten part that has him sniveling and cringing in front of his Goddess for most of the film. Both Kim Basinger and Madonna turned down the female lead, sensing how appalling many audience members would find the whole thing. I am not sure if the creators intended for this to be an allegory on male dominance of women, but the cheapskate ending when we learn that this was just the surgeon’s dream-fantasy after he was knocked out trying to push his stalking-object out of the way of the oncoming car is just one of the shortcuts taken that diminishes the film’s impact. I am guessing that a Hollywood test audience panned the dark, perverted film, so the producers had to tack on a more acceptable dream ending to sell the film. They failed—the film was a box office and critical disaster. This last second editing is how cinematic muddles are created--see the fake happy ending of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, tacked on after similar audience testing, which spoiled an otherwise great movie. I was about to write the whole film off, but then realized that it was really a subpar remake of one of my favorite B-movie horror films of childhood.

The Head that Wouldn’t Die (aka The Brain that Wouldn’t Die) is truly a wonderful film. I was addicted to horror films in my boyhood, and this one has stayed lodged in my brain—it wouldn’t die, so to speak. I was able to even hum some of the surprisingly evocative film score right along with it last week, despite not having seen the film in fifty years. It begins in the hospital (low-budget medical special effects, including an ECG hooked up wrong) with Dr. Bill Cortner saving a dead patient by transplanting a new heart into him, violating hospital protocols. There is a surprisingly scientifically literate discussion of T cells and the immune system here, despite the fact that in 1962 kidney transplants were only eight years old, and other organs had yet to be transplanted. Performing this operation without permission seems ridiculous, but is it? It seemed quite in keeping with arrogant behavior I have seen from physicians, including one past surgical chairman who was fired for injecting bacteria into unknowing brain trauma patients, because in rat studies this had led some comatose rats to recover. I enjoyed the bioethics discussion here. While Dr. Cortner’s behavior was made out to be insane in this movie, it seemed quite predictable, given what I have seen in bioresearch (and surgical chairmen). Anyway, our unhinged doctor takes his adoring nurse (cue lots of 1960’s sexual harassment and smoking in the operating room) on a road trip and crashes the car. He rescues her severed head from the wreckage and hooks her up to a secret plasma infusion (lots of Frankenstein style glassware and low budget lab sounds) to maintain her brain/head until he finds her a proper body to transplant on to.

For this, he goes hunting at a burlesque cocktail lounge, trying to persuade exotic dancers there to come back home with him for an unwitting whole-body donation. The sultry saxophone solo played during this segment was vividly ensconced in my memory from childhood. But before the ethically-challenged doctor has the chance to do his dastardly transplant, his body-less girlfriend, quite upset at being stuck in a big Petri dish, vows revenge and learns to mind-control the creature in a nearby closet. This is another unhappy lab denizen who is a mishmash of abandoned rejected transplant parts who likes to rip the arms off of unwitting doctors that happen by. The girlfriend’s bitchy body-less broadsides from the bench are the direct predecessor of the sniping of the legless trapped girlfriend in Boxing Helena. Eventually, she persuades the monster in the closet to gruesomely kill the doctor, who unphysiologically manages to have an extended farewell scene after his arm is ripped off. Side note: the monster was intriguingly played by “The Jewish Giant” Eddie Carmel, an actor with growth hormone excess (acromegaly) who was over 7 feet tall. He had a lively 36-year life, selling insurance, performing in carnival sideshows, and acting in fine movies like this one and 1963’s 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing).

Believe it or not, this B movie is one of the best of its genre. Its score and camerawork are innovative and varied, with nice modernist touches of atonal music and odd camera angles and fast cuts. The low-budget special effects are not as laughable as in many such films. You even get to learn a bit of transplant immunology for your trouble, always a bonus in my book. Mimicking film auteurs like Bergman and Godard, even the opening credits are cool, as we hear the body-less girlfriend croak “let me die!” before the opening credits even get started. This film is perhaps the unlikeliest member of my favorite films collection, but is well worth a view.