Horror Challenge entry #11: The Body Shop AKA Doctor Gore (1973, J.G. Patterson Jr.)
How bad does a film have to be to make Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films look like sensitive, thoughtful masterpieces in comparison? This damn bad.
Starts off promisingly dumb, with a mad scientist using tin foil on a body “to seal in all the radium” and a midget hunchback who needs help putting on his lab coat, but the fun doesn’t last. Patterson ladles on the grue in this offbeat “Frankenstein” gloss, yet his film is too inept and uninspired to work even in the intended titillative function. Maybe it’s because, despite the exploitative material, Patterson never seems to commit to the idea of a gut-pulling gore flick, and once his creation (a lovely, nubile young woman with the brain of a child) is complete, the film turns into some awkward combination of love story and brain-cracked sitcom about the difference between men and women. (Seriously, there’s even a musical montage with the doctor and his creation frolicking in nature and making googly eyes at one another.) All the tempura paint and white linen can’t keep this from being dispiritingly terrible, even by the standards of Florida-lensed exploitation films. Even the score, an obnoxiously insistent organ-based thing, is awful. In fact, fuck Lewis… Patterson makes William Grefe look talented by comparison. The befuddling non-ending is just icing on the cake.
From the Shelf: The Ape (1940, William Nigh)
Acquired: Given to me by my mother a number of years ago.
Seen before?: Once - February 15th, 2005.
I didn’t have much to say the first time around, and I don’t have much to add to that not-much. This is a B-movie programmer of the worst kind, the kind that is neither interesting nor incompetent enough to be memorable. It’s literally film as product, cranked out like a sausage and tossed out to an audience that wasn’t there to see it but wanted their money’s worth for the day.
The only one working beyond basic workmanship, as was true for many a film in which he appeared, is the great Boris Karloff, who seems to be doing all he can to invest his stock character (the obsessed mad scientist) with soul and gravitas. Karloff’s character is easily the most noble in the film; though he commits evil deeds, he does them in service of a worthy cause (curing paralysis), and everyone he sins against is pictured as loathsome wastes of breath. I’d think the screenwriter was trying to make a point about the slippery morality of working for the greater good if the whole of the film wasn’t so threadbare; instead, I suspect he was typing pages five minutes prior to their filming.
Up next: The river and death…
