Head of the Family

(1996) **

I had to check this one out after JPX's hilarious review of it last year (I recommend you read that first).

I've been feeling like maybe I've been hitting too many quality movies this year, and here's the perfect andidote. I think the budget for this movie was several big boxes of Jolly Ranchers that the crew had to go and trade for stuff. The town consists of the diner, the sidewalk outside the diner, and the inside of the diner. It's so small that one biker thug is the whole mafia. The only other thing in town is the Stackpool's house.

Ah, the Stackpools. They were an antidote of a different sort, since I watched this the same day as the two Chainsaws. This gang of freaks is nowhere near unnerving as the Hewitts. And that head! It really is worth watching this silly movie just to see the big head. After seeing the picture of Myron by himself (in JPX's review), I thought his head was just slightly larger than normal. But it's giant! The effect is entirely achieved with forced perspective, the cheapest special effect ever. Every shot of Myron is like the one above, where he's parked next to someone who's obviously a few feet behind him. It's his ginormous hands that give it away.

Like this movie, Myron's budget of genius intellect is of the shoestring variety. The whole caper starts because he's discovered hijacking motorists for his evil scheme, which is some vague plot to get himself a body. These people are captured, half their brains are removed, and then they live gibbering in the Stackpool's basement. None of this has yielded any kind of useful result, mostly because Myron can't find a victim with a head the size of a beer keg.

When blackmailed, he caves immediately. When they seem to have Lance the blackmailer on the ropes, he effortlessly confounds Myron again with a story about a second lawyer with the evidence. In order to coax the lawyer's name out of him, Myron intends to set girlfriend Loretta on fire, but...hang on while I stop giggling...okay, first she has to be in a scene about Joan of Arc starring a bunch of the half-brained dudes from the basement. This is by far the longest scene in the movie, and while it does involve Loretta getting naked again, by this point I was pulling the hairs on my arm to stay awake.

"You can't light a fire in here," says Lance, "you'll burn your house down." Myron laughs evilly and explains that he's fireproofed and ventilated the room. It's like the Special Olympics of evil genius or something. At some point Myron tells Loretta he's too busy plotting world domination to deal with a relationship (I'll have to remember that one), and I thought "What world domination? You're stuck feeding a bunch of morons, your evil plans suck! And anyway, you're just a great big head!"

I'm not telling you to see this, but in its way it's the quintessential Horrorthon movie.