Sep 02 2008
A Box full O’ Babes
Doctor Gore aka The Body Shop (1973) *** - Bad movie buffs take note, this is a real winner! On DVD from Something Weird video this used to be available years ago from Paragon Video with an introduction from Herschel Gordon Lewis. It seems that Lewis was friends with the director/writer/star Pat Patterson who also helped Lewis with the effects in some of his later films. Here Patterson takes the full reigns to deliver a unique and grisly bad movie bouquet that should delight fans of this sort of thing. It seems our beloved Doctor Branon has lost his wife to a car crash, but as we discover in the very first scene he intends to bring her back to life, “but better. More perfect in every way!” So him and his hunchback grunting assistant (horrifyingly named…Greg!) set about robbing graves to nab the right parts. But after covering a corpse in tin foil and trying to reanimate it everything goes wrong. They decide that the only route that makes sense is to hypnotize women and cut off the perfect parts they need. So you get Pat Patterson and his amazing colossal comb over making out with babes in bikinis and then luring them back to his lab in a trance. Never mind the fact that if he has the power to pretty much bed any hot babe around why would he need to create a living perfect women in the first place! So they start hacking up girls in effects scenes that are surprisingly effective for the time period and obvious lack of budget. One dismembered torso is actually rather frighteningly conveyed. Unneeded parts are done away with in the handy acid vat. Greg keeps his bottle of hooch in the freezer with the dismembered body parts and a bunny rabbit just hangs out on set for no reason at all. One shot has some delivery men bring a big box and you can see well over the tops of the set by at least three feet or more. Once the perfect woman is completed the movie sort of comes apart as it clearly is unfinished from this point out, starting from a montage where the Doctor is explaining how he has to teach the new woman everything from scratch about being alive. His voice over explains a whole bunch of stuff, then the montage shows us the same stuff he explained, AFTER he has said it. He teaches her how to love but she takes to it a little too well and when he catches her hugging on poor Greg, things get ugly fast. Towards the end there is the most blatant and shocking camera clap board ever left in a film in history further underscoring that this is unfinished. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the incredible music by one Bill Hicks. Not the acerbic and dearly departed comedian, but a cherubic, bearded lounge singer whose songs stop the movie dead at least twice. I dunno about you, but I kinda miss the days of no budget movies when they were padded with lounge musical numbers meant to further the careers of musical nobodies. If you haven’t gotten the point yet, this is AWESOME!!!
Apparently this is out of print and getting hard to find. I couldn’t locate it on Amazon or ebay to reference here in this review.
