On the June 28, 1969, episode of The Rosey Grier Show, he sang a cover version of the Temptations song Get Ready. Around that same time, I was in the audience at a telethon in Jackson, Tennessee where saw Rosey Grier perform the song live. I really liked his performance of the song, and I didn’t realize that anyone else had ever recorded it. I also didn’t know that Rosey had ever played football. I thought he was primarily famous for singing. I never thought that an ex-football player would be the host of his own variety show. By the time I saw commercials for The Thing with Two Heads, I knew he had played football and was into needlepoint. From the looks of the commercials, I thought this would be a fun film to see.
It is best described as a blaxslploitation science fiction film. Some would add comedy to this list of descriptions. While it has some intentional jokes, the majority of the fun from the film comes from cheap special effects. Ray Milland plays a doctor who isn’t going to live very long. He has developed a method of transplanting the head of a gorilla onto the body of another one. He intends to place his head on another person’s body, then remove the other head, giving him a new body. MIlland’s character is a racist so when his assistant puts his head on Rosey Grier’s body, he is appalled. Grier’s character was wrongfully convicted of a crime a had been sentenced to death, but he opted to give his body to science. This experiment was the result. With the two heads on one body, this becomes a sci-fi version of The Defiant Ones. There are plenty of race related jokes that are tossed around. Most of the scenes are done with Ray Milland placing his head just over Rosey Grier’s shoulder. Any other scenes after the transplant show Grier with an obviously fake head poorly attached to his shoulder. It wobbles to extremes especially in a motorcycle chase scene. One of the most memorable scenes has Grier’s character showing up at his girlfriend’s apartment with this white man’s head on his shoulder. She asks him if he has two of anything else.
In the end, Grier’s character is found innocent of the charges, they remove Milland’s head from his shoulder, and he connects with his girlfriend again. In the closing scene, they are driving down the road singing Oh Happy Day with the Mike Curb Congregation. This film became a family favorite when we picked up a copy on DVD that included The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant that was made by the same company only a year earlier. This is a perfect double feature.