- Directed by Joseph Green
- Written by Doris Brent, Joseph Green
- Stars Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Anthony La Penna, Adele Lamont
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 22 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqKv_kLZZGQ
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a pretty awful movie at its core, with lots to pick apart. On the other hand, it does have a story, they are trying hard, and it’s a fun watch. So you may be reluctantly entertained if you watch it.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on a pair of father and son surgeons. The operation is a failure, and the patient dies. “Now Dad, do I have permission to do things my way? He’s dead, I can’t do any harm.” They cut open the dead man’s brain and heart to massage them. The man’s heart restarts. It’s not clear why he was being operated on to begin with, but he’s going to survive now.
Older doctor Dan Cortner asks, “What about side effects?” He warns about experimenting on people. Bill, the younger doctor, says he’s getting really advanced with transplanting body parts. Nurse Jan comes in, and she’s Bill’s fiance. They’re going up to Bill’s cabin lab in the woods. They get a call from Kurt up at the cabin; something has gone wrong up there.
They rush up to the country home, but Bill drives like a maniac and crashes. He’s thrown clear, but Jan is burned alive in the wreckage. He only takes one piece of her home with him– her head. He runs the rest of the way to the cabin. The “Cabin” turns out to be a huge mansion, and Kurt lets him in.
Kurt wants Bill to look in the closet, but Bill insists they get ready for emergency surgery. Before long, we see Jan’s head on a plate in the lab, still alive. She mumbles in her sleep, “Let me die.” Bill has been working on transplants, so he says he can find her another body, even better than before. Kurt thinks he’s a madman; “What about her soul?” Bill thinks they can keep the head alive for forty or fifty hours until they get her a body.
Kurt complains about his withered arm, an early experiment that failed. Bill finally looks in the closet, where something is locked inside and makes inhuman noises. He’s horrified at the sight of it and insists that Kurt keep the door locked.
Bill goes to town and visits a strip club. One of the strippers does a slow dance for Bill. As he flirts with the blonde stripper, Jan wakes up in the lab. “Let me die!” A brunette stripper comes in and interrupts Bill’s action. He ends up leaving both of them since one mentions that he’s so “memorable.” The two strippers then have a catfight after he leaves.
Jan talks to the thing inside the closet. It communicates by knocking on the door, and she finds out that she’s not the first. She asks if it wants revenge; it does. “Together, we’ll wreak our revenge!” They work together to scare Kurt, who explains all of Bill’s work on transplants. Kurt only helps Bill because he hopes he can get a new arm out of the deal. Jan demonstrates that she can control the creature behind the door, and Kurt runs out.
The next morning, Bill goes on the prowl for more women. He finds an old friend, Donna, on the side of the road. She invites him to a “bathing beauty” contest that he can help judge. Still, she gets in the car with him. Donna’s friend Jeannie horns in and wants a ride too; Bill knows he can’t take either of them since there’d be a witness. They go to the beauty contest; there are five finalists. He likes what he sees, but then he remembers Doris, another old friend who does jobs as a figure model.
Jan can read Bill’s mind and knows his plan. She tells the monster in the closet. Bill goes to Doris’s house, and she’s got a bunch of photographers there, taking photos of her in the nude. She hates men now, ever since her “accident.” She’s got a badly-burned face, but her body is perfect from the neck down. He says he can help her be beautiful again– he has new procedures that could fix her right up.
She agrees to go with him. She wants to call a friend and talk about her good news, but he says she should wait until she sees how it works out. She goes with him…
Meanwhile, Jan convinces the closet-creature to start working on beating down the door. “Can your horror match mine?” The creature knocks once for “yes.” Kurt comes in and talks about piecing the monster together from random limbs. It’s mutated since then of course, and it’s much worse than before.
The monster reaches through the hole in the door and literally pulls off Kurt’s good arm. Kurt then staggers upstairs, but he can’t open the door with his bad hand, so he dies as Jan cackles in maniacal glee.
Bill and Doris arrive at the house. Bill goes into the lab and finds what’s left of Kurt. Janet doesn’t say a word, playing dumb. He lets the body lie there as he fixes a drugged drink for Doris. She starts getting woozy and knows what he’s done.
“I told you I’d bring you a body,” he tells Jan. Jan doesn’t want to hurt innocent Doris– she’s not that evil. She just wants to make the guys pay for their work.
Bill gets prepped for surgery. “You must be stopped,” Jan grunts. He tapes her mouth shut, but she can still communicate with her friend in the closet. The creature knocks at the door, so Bill opens the little window. It grabs him, and the door comes off its hinges. The huge mutant comes out and starts a fire in the lab. It bites out a fatal chunk of Bill’s neck. The monster grabs Doris’s unconscious body and carries it out to safety. Jan says, “I told you to let me die,” as the flames consume her.
Commentary
We watched “The Rare Uncensored Version,” available on Amazon Prime. It added some previously-censored gore and an extended stripper cat-fight. The nudity in Doris’s photo shoot had to have been added for a more recent edition as well.
There’s a scene where Jan and Kurt talk about things that feels like it takes an hour– it’s very poorly paced. Kurt takes forever to die, staggering around from room to room.
No one ever found Bill’s burned-up car with the fried headless skeleton inside? The “porno” music that plays whenever Bill is out on the prowl for women is hilariously bad.
“Jan in the pan” has become a horror icon herself. It’s an awful movie with a ridiculous plot, but she’s so over-the-top evil that it’s hard to resist. How does her makeup look so good when she’s only a head?