The Body Shop aka Doctor Gore (J.G. Patterson Jr., 1972)

The Body Shop, retitled Doctor Gore in 1973 (Dr. Gore became my primary care physician after Dr. Butcher stopped accepting my employer's insurance), is a prime example of regional DIY '70s exploitation weirdness. Every scene is either hilariously nuts or boring as shit, nothing in between. If you can make it through those inert stretches and you share my love of underground regional wackiness, you'll have at least half of a great time.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based exploitation filmmaker J.G. Patterson Jr., born as (if IMDb isn't telling tales out of school) Jr Junius Gustavious Patterson and also known as Pat Patterson (not the pro wrestler/wrestling executive) and Don Brandon, was a jack-of-all-trades and clearly master-of-none drive-in/grindhouse Renaissance man and protégé of Florida-based exploitation king Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red) (all three reviewed on this site). In Patterson's relatively short life (he died of melanoma in 1975 at the age of 45), he had a hand in many low-budget exploitation movies in almost as many roles (director, producer, writer, actor, makeup artist, special effects artist, assistant director, production manager).

Patterson's showbiz career started in the late '50s, when he hosted local Charlotte television's late-night horror show Shock Theater as the Mad Daddy. This is not to be confused with Cleveland's late-night TV horror show Shock Theater, which was hosted by Ernie Anderson (Paul Thomas Anderson's dad) as Ghoulardi. To make things even more confusing, one of Cleveland's most popular rock radio DJs at the time, Pete Myers, also went by the name Mad Daddy and had a brief and unsuccessful run of his own as a late-night TV horror host a few years before Ghoulardi hit the scene to much greater success. (Myers would go on to radio stints in San Diego and New York City before committing suicide in 1968 at age 40, though some people think it was a murder. I'm digressing now.)

At some point after Shock Theater's demise, Patterson befriended Herschell Gordon Lewis and learned the ropes of exploitation filmmaking as assistant director on Moonshine Mountain, Lewis's personal assistant on She-Devils on Wheels, Just for the Hell of It, and How to Make a Doll, and assistant producer on The Gruesome Twosome. Through his association with Lewis, he met other indie exploitation filmmakers and helped them out, too, acting in and producing Albert T. Viola's Southernsploitation Preacherman, editing and producing Frederick R. Friedel's Axe (aka California Axe Massacre aka Lisa, Lisa) (reviewed on this site), and doing makeup effects for William Girdler's Three on a Meathook. The ill-fated Girdler, probably the most talented of everyone mentioned so far, cranked out a dizzying array of drive-in/grindhouse movies while still in his twenties, including Abby, 'Sheba, Baby', Grizzly, Day of the Animals (probably the only movie in which a shirtless Leslie Nielsen gets into a fistfight with a grizzly bear), and The Manitou before dying in a helicopter crash in the Philippines at the age of 30 while scouting locations for his next film.

Patterson kicked off his own short-lived directing career with The Body Shop, a low-rent Bride of Frankenstein-ish tale of a mad scientist creating his ideal woman from the body parts of multiple women and reanimating the results in his lab. Patterson plays the lead role, Dr. Don Brandon, under the name Don Brandon, or, as the opening credits bill him, "America's No. 1 Magician: Don Brandon," which is hilarious for all kinds of reasons, a few prominent ones being Patterson aka Brandon was not a magician and does not play one in this movie (though he does hypnotize some of his victims), a small supporting character in the movie is a magician, and Don Brandon was the real name of a well-known magician (billed as Brandon the Magician) who was halfway through his career when this movie was made.

The movie begins with a wistful Dr. Brandon gazing into a lake, listening to a DJ on a transistor radio announce the death of his beauty queen socialite wife in a plane crash before segueing into weepy country ballad "A Heart Dies Every Minute" by local band Bill Hicks (not the comedian) and the Rainbows. Hicks and the Rainbows perform the song live in its entirety in a nightclub scene near the halfway point. (Speaking of music in The Body Shop, the film's score was composed by the aforementioned Girdler and is a creepy variation on "My Favorite Things" with new lyrics.) After the funeral, feminist icon Dr. Brandon gets to work assembling the perfect woman, one even more beautiful than his late wife, to become his lifelong companion. He's aided in his mad scientist lab by his hunchbacked assistant Greg (Roy Mehaffey) who cannot speak, communicating through grunts, moans, and various other mouth sounds.

The first half of the film mostly takes place in the lab and involves test runs of the equipment, deliveries of a woman in a crate (the doctor to the enormously hunchbacked Greg when delivery men knock on the door with the crate: "Put your coat on so they don't know you're a hunchback"), and various women drugged or hypnotized by Dr. Brandon because he likes their arms, legs, hands, torsos, etc. As the doctor explains to Greg, "Hands on a woman are most important. It's the delicate feminine hand that brings out the true femininity." I'm always saying this. The doc then gruesomely removes the desired body part, Greg puts it in frozen storage, and the rest of the body is dissolved in an acid bath. An attempt to reanimate a whole, intact dead woman by covering her in tin foil, taping the foil down with Scotch tape, and then blasting her with the mad science equipment for a ridiculously extended stretch of time ends in failure and the acid bath, but by the time the assembled ideal woman is ready to be zapped with the science, Dr. Brandon has upgraded to a glass and metal tube.

Occasionally, the doctor gets out of the lab to hypnotize attractive young women at the country music and live magic nightclub, the beach, or an office's reception desk and bring them back to the lab for body part extractions and acid baths. At the nightclub entrance, he's hit on by an attractive, age-appropriate woman who was a friend of his wife's. He brushes her off and makes a disgusted grimace and exhaled sigh of relief when she goes inside. I don't mean to be rude, but the good doc should look at himself in the mirror. He's in his early forties and looks 62 (this may have something to do with the chain smoking and lack of hydration that was the style of the time), sports a ridiculous combover, has an aggressively large head and crazy eyes, and has the charisma of Pat Sajak on Quaaludes, and he has the audacity to reject attractive women and/or most of their body parts? This guy just might be #problematic.

Anyway, physically ideal woman (Jenny Driggers, former Miss Pro Am Dragway at the Rockingham, NC, Dragway) assembled, the doc and Greg zap some more science into her, and it works. She's alive! She's alive! The doc names her Anitra and tells Greg he will never gaze upon her again, with punishment of death. The only man she will ever see from now on is Dr. Brandon so that he can mold her into the perfect companion. We hear his thoughts in voice-over as he hypnotizes her. He wipes her past memories ("she won't even remember how to drink a glass of water") and re-educates her to cater to his every whim. They have a few laughs, he tells her how to drink water (for a guy who looks like he never drinks water, he's sure obsessed with the stuff), she finally understands that he's the man and she's the woman after some madcap misunderstandings, he introduces her to sex, they have sun-dappled good times in the woods near the lake, and the future is golden.

Unfortunately for Dr. Brandon, he makes some bonehead plays. Anitra easily wanders into the lab unsupervised and hugs Greg ("you're a man!"), which is bad news for Greg. Then, the doc decides to run some errands even though a water heater is being delivered, leaving Anitra on the couch in a bikini reading Hot Stuff magazine (I'm a subscriber but only for the articles). The delivery driver gets an eyeful of Anitra, she tells him he's a man (his response: "Boy, you sure ain't!"), and he invites her to his truck, leading to our exciting (?) denouement.

I live for this kind of trash, but there are long stretches where not much is happening or too much is happening or the same thing happens for way too long. If you're a fan of regional DIY lunacy, you've probably developed a solid strain of immunity and can handle it. The freakishly nutty scenes and time-capsule local color moments are the reward. If your main jam is the Marvel Cinematic Universe or middlebrow Oscarbait or prestige TV, this ain't gonna light you on fire, but the worst of the worst of these movies is worth more than 100 Avengers movies to me. Each one is such a reflection of the flawed and unique human person who made it and the local flavor of the area where it was filmed and has its own weird energy even when the goal is to make a quick, cheap buck. Part of that local flavor includes the Overlook Castle, a famous mountaintop mansion in Asheville. The castle is the exterior location of the lab, and Patterson somehow got permission to do some filming inside the mansion, making excellent use of the large picture windows.

Despite creating the occasional memorable scene or image, Patterson was the filmmaking equivalent of a carny grifter and was not a man for retakes or too much attention to detail. In one of the final scenes, the clapperboard is fully visible. He needed the dialogue and didn't have a replacement shot, so he just left it in. Accidentally meta, brother. In a hilarious scene, a good ol' boy Southern patrolman knocks on the door. Even though the scene takes place at night, every shot of the patrolman is in blinding daylight. The conversation proceeds as follows: "What the heck is goin' on in here? You boys makin' 'shine?" "No, officer, I'm a doctor." "OK, sorry to bother ya." I love it. Patterson directed two more movies after The Body Shop, the last one hitting theaters a year after his death. The followup, Boots and the Preacher, a crime thriller about a murder at a radio station, was presumed lost for years until Vinegar Syndrome got their hands on an elusive print, restored it, and released it on Blu-Ray last year. His final film, The Electric Chair, is an eccentric courtroom drama.

I'll leave the last word to whichever genius created the copy for The Body Shop's local poster when the movie played the Tryon Hills Shopping Center in Raleigh: "(picture of a blonde bikini babe who does not appear in the movie) She's the monster in 'The Body Shop' and it's X rated! You won't believe how they make her! It is gorrific. . . .  That is why it's rated X. Filmed entirely in North Carolina! Maybe one of her parts came from your street."

The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

Probably the only courtroom drama/film noir/mad scientist sci-fi/ape-running-amok horror movie/revenge thriller, The Monster and the Girl is a wild surprise, a schizophrenically genre-switching, narratively berserk, but tonally consistent little gem with strong performances, great character actor faces, and real feeling. It's definitely shooting to the top of my ape-running-amok list, and not just because it was withdrawn from theaters in Milwaukee by the city's film commission (for its depiction of "white slavery" and its implied criticism of the justice system).

The Monster and the Girl begins, after a fog-drenched, expressionist intro directed straight at the audience, in a courtroom, where Scot Webster (Phillip Terry) is being tried for the  murder of a man in a downtown hotel. (The movie never mentions what city we're in, but the sets look an awful lot like a Hollywoodized version of Manhattan.) Scot maintains his innocence but has no proof or witnesses, he's hesitant to say much of anything about why he was in the hotel or what he was up to, and he was discovered kneeling over the dead man and holding the gun. Scot's sister Susan (Ellen Drew) shows up and demands to be heard as a witness, much to everyone's surprise. The judge allows it despite the defense attorney's objections. Meanwhile, the camera picks out several shady characters sitting in the courtroom who take great interest in the case and keep sending not-so-subtle signals to each other.

The film's first half alternates the courtroom drama with flashback sequences tied to Scot's and Susan's testimonies, which tell a darkly tragic crime story in classic film noir style with classic film noir faces. Those faces belong to actors who are not top-of-marquee names, but if you're a classic Hollywood fan, you've seen them do excellent work in lots of memorable roles. Besides the aforementioned Drew (Preston Sturges' Christmas in July, Sam Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, and Andre de Toth's Man in the Saddle) and Terry (Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and Robert Wise's Born to Kill), we get Joseph Calleia (W.S. Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, Allan Dwan's The Gorilla, Heisler's The Glass Key, Charles Vidor's Gilda, Douglas Sirk's Lured, Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood, and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Marc Lawrence (Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire, William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, John Huston's Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, John Hayes' Dream No Evil, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, Jim McBride's The Big Easy, Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action), Gerald Mohr (Vidor's Gilda, William Wyler's Detective Story, Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper, and Jerry Lewis' The Family Jewels), George Zucco (Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Elliott Nugent's The Cat and the Canary, Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand, Sirk's Lured, and Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate), and Rod Cameron (Sturges' Christmas in July, Edward Ludwig's The Gun Hawk, and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie). Sorry, I went credits-crazy there.

Back to the flashbacks. Scot and Susan are very close (it's implied that their parents are long gone and that they took care of each other), but while Scot is happy in the small town working at the post office and playing organ in the church, Susan has bigger dreams that only the Big City can fulfill. Bored and stifled in the small town, she gets her big brother's blessing to strike out on her own. In the movie's only bit of (restrained) moralizing, Susan finds out the city is no place for a young, single woman. She struggles to find work, and, after meeting a seemingly kind man named Larry Reed (Robert Paige) at the unemployment office, falling in love, and quickly getting married, she wakes up to a living nightmare. The relationship and marriage ceremony were both scams, designed to trap her (and presumably plenty of other naive young women on their own) in the permanent servitude of a gangster/sex-trafficker pimp (that part is heavily implied but never spelled out in any dialogue because it's post-Code Hollywood) named W. S. Bruhl (Paul Lukas) and his henchmen Deacon (Calleia), Sleeper (Lawrence), Munn (Mohr), and fake husband Larry. These guys all have such menacing, character-filled faces.

When Scot finds out what happened to his sister, he hits the big city looking for revenge. The gangsters frame him for murder, corrupt district attorney McMasters (Onslow Stevens) prosecutes him, and the possibly tampered-with jury convicts, despite Susan's testimony. Scot is sentenced to death. Susan is devastated and hopeless. The only person who believes her and Scot is newspaper reporter Sam Daniels (Cameron).

This is where the movie turns on a dime and gets crazy as hell. An eccentric scientist, Dr. Parry (Zucco), visits Scot on Death Row and asks him if he can use his brain after he's executed. A defeated Scot laughs crazily and gives him permission. After the execution, Parry takes the freshly deceased Scot to his lab and transplants the brain into the body of an ape. You know, for science. Ape-Scot busts out of the lab, hits the streets, and begins a program of retribution against the gangster and his crew, beginning with the corrupt DA and ending with the jerk who pretended to fall in love with his sister. Along the way, he also re-befriends his and his sister's beloved dog Skipper, who recognizes the Scot-soul inside the ape and assists Scot in evading the police like some kind of revenge-loving Lassie. I love to see an ape with a human brain and a cute dog teaming up to kill gangster-pimps and avenge the honor of a woman wronged. This is cinema, baby. (Oddly, the last 1940s movie I reviewed on this site, Man Made Monster, also involved a cute dog recognizing his old buddy in monster form and rekindling the bond.)

If you've followed this site for any length of time, you've probably read one of my reviews about an ape-running-amok movie. This was a major craze in the '20s and early '30s, but the genre never quite died out completely. Usually, the movie involves a caged ape getting loose and tearing shit up or a guy in a gorilla suit killing people or scaring people off as part of some kind of money grift or inheritance scam. Most of these movies are not that great, and some of the gorilla suits are pretty damn unconvincing (though I hold a special place in my heart for cheap fx).

The Monster and the Girl, on the other hand, spends half the movie delivering a gripping courtroom drama and a classic film noir before throwing in the crazy mad scientist brain swap-eroo and ape rampage. You really care about these characters, you're hooked on the proceedings, and you can't wait to see these gangster/trafficker creeps get smushed. The ape-with-human-brain is a real character you're invested in, not just some goofball jumping around in a costume. And boy howdy, this production spent money on its ape suit, I tell you what. This thing looks convincing and has a real presence and a range of motion in the eyes and facial features.

Director Stuart Heisler was a film editor for many years before making the jump to directing, and you can see his understanding of structure, build, and juxtaposition in The Monster and the Girl. This could have easily been a schlocky b-movie lazily slapped together (which, let's be honest, I probably would have enjoyed), but so much care has been applied to putting this thing together, and everyone in front of and behind the camera is doing high quality work. It's such an odd movie, attempting such an odd thing, and it works ridiculously well. I loved it.