My wife recently clued me to the yet another contemporary phrase of which I was previous unaware and that is “Manson lamps”. For those similarly uninformed, this means large crazy eyes, like how Charles Manson looks in seemingly every photo of him.
Gideon Drew has that look throughout his turn as the villain in 1958’s The Thing That Couldn’t Die. For most of the runtime, those eyes stared wildly from a head is separate from the rest of his body, courtesy of some obvious but well-executed effects. That he is just a crazed severed head most of the time reminds me of a bit from the show Gravity Falls where the diabolical Bill “gifts” 12-year-old Dipper a severed head that won’t stop screaming.
To its credit, this deeply ridiculous film doesn’t allow Drew’s head to scream, as there wouldn’t be lungs to make sound. But that’s about the extent of scientific accuracy the film allows, as we still have a noggin with an active brain and bugged-out eyes and a mouth that keeps opening and closing like a goldfish that accidentally jumped out of its bowl. The last is effectively creepy, if I’m being honest.
Those eyes can hypnotize others to do Drew’s bidding, such as pitting the big but dumb Charles Horvath against fellow ranch hand James Anderson. You see, there’s an old treasure chest that was discovered on Peggy Converse’s land, and she’s convinced there’s gold in it, as she is apparently a pre-teen boy whose dream of finding a treasure chest came true.
Only a professor played by William Reynolds can keep her from destroying a likely priceless historical article, by breaking the chest open with a pickaxe. It will still be opened, when a duplicitous Anderson convinces his muscular friend to help him pry it open, only to discover his attempt to get ahead in life the easy way only gets him a head—Drew’s to be exact.
Drew’s character was apparently part of Sir Francis Drake’s 16th century expedition which landed somewhere on the California coast. Given this film appears to be shot in the desert, I doubted the landing party would have come that far inland. Anywho, it seems Drew had been mesmerizing the others from the ship, and so they had cut off his head and stored it in that chest in one location before burying his body elsewhere. The mind reels in wonder at why no additional precautions were taken, like just cremating the whole thing, or burial at sea. But, as always, you wouldn’t have a movie if people acted that cautiously.
So, you now have a head in search of a body and Drew will use his powers of mesmerism to use the various people on Converse’s ranch to accomplish this. In addition to the aforementioned, there’s Andra Martin and Jeffrey Stone as a couple who joined Reynolds on his vacation. The relationship dynamics of that trio scan as a bit odd, such as in the first moment we see them, all riding up on horses from a day trip into the mountains. Something about their manner made me wonder if they got up to a different kind of exercise up in those hills.
The central character, however, is Carolyn Kerney, a young woman with various psychic abilities, including dowsing. While I believe rhabdomancy (bet you didn’t know that word) is complete bullshit, I always thought that was limited to trying to find water. At least, that’s what we see her doing in her first moments on screen, when she goes to a large tree which, I don’t know, seems to me like a very likely place to find water, as trees do need water. Anywho, she can also use her dowsing rod to find lost wedding rings and even Drew’s coffin. I thought the idea of traditional dowsing was that the wood of the branch held would seek water, so I wondered why it wouldn’t take a sliver of a ring or Drew’s corpse to find those respective objects.
The Thing That Couldn’t Die is a very bad movie, though one that can provide a great many unintended laughs for those in the right frame of mind. With so much craziness on the screen, it seems odd to me I’m stuck on one mundane element, and that is the dirt outside is always so flat and undisturbed as to be indistinguishable from pavement in the black-and-white photography. Forget about evil severed heads discovered through dowsing—the real supernatural force is whatever is keeping that loose dirt so compacted at all times.
Dir: Will Cowan
Starring Carolyn Kearney, William Reynolds, Andra Martin
Watched on Shout Factory’s blu-ray set Universal Horror Collection: Volume 6