The Body Shop

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069811/

(1974)

Country:USA

Alternate Titles

Doctor Gore

Anitra

Shrieks in the Night

Directed by J.G. Patterson

Staring J.G. Patterson

Roy Mehaffrey

Jenny Driggens

The Body shop is infamously bad, and infamously incomplete.

It was written, directed and stared J.G Patterson Jr, also known as Dr Gore, though here goes under the name of his character Don Brandon. In the movie he takes the role of a strong willed doctor, who can influence and dominate those around him - which was pure fantasy since according to all accounts Patterson was a soft, easily influenced individual. According to what information is available this characteristic seemed to have come to worked against him in the hard world of exploitation cinema. A lot of the time he found himself trying to create realistic gore effects for even less money then his contemporaries. He would also be easily deceived by charismatic, unscrupulous characters one could easily imagine being around during that era.

He died in the mid-70's with most of his projects incomplete, many came out as late as three years after his death. They would find a new life with Herschel Gordon Lewis. Lewis, a big fan of Patterson, would physically introduce many of his incomplete movies when they made it to video in the 1980's, sometimes even warning of the content... ie. bad acting, bad story lines, bad editing, ect.

"The Body Shop" movies opens with a really creepy version of “Sugar and Spice” on a toy piano. Some complain this music is lame, but I found it sufficiently creepy, and besides it's all downhill from there so take what you could get.

Through the radio we learn the great plastic surgeon Dr Brandon has just lost his wife to a car accident. He vows to bring her back. So him and his hunchback assistant dig up a body, I'm assuming is his former wife, and play Dr Frankenstein for 15 minutes. It doesn't work out so well so he orders the corpse tossed into a vat of acid.

He doesn't seem too upset over this. Well upset enough to have a smoke I guess.

So as the movie progresses (kind of) he does several poor melodramatic soliloquies, rose in hand, then goes on a quest to make the perfect woman. This means he must seduce various woman, kill them and then sew them together. Well to be fair he does order one corpse through the mail. (????)

I think it's suggested he seduces these women through hypnotism, but it could just be Patterson pretending to be someone he's not.

I hate to say it but that is the meat of the movie.

Disasters around the set, the inevitable financial difficulties and Patterson's death meant the movie was never completed. So there's no coherent climax to the story and scenes which should have been edited out, like some of the tedium of Brandon working in his lab and a scene where he talks to a cop about nothing, are left in.

The conversion with the cop is particularly funny cause Brandon is talking through a darkened doorway with the camera far behind him and the cop is filmed outside during a completely different period of day. Also the cop says he's heard something suspicious was going on (doesn't say what) then Brandon responds with "Im a doctor", which is sufficient enough for that officer to bugger off.

Once Brandon makes his “perfect” woman, who is more like a daughter/love, the movie goes into overdrive since this part was never filmed.

Dr Brandon gets a call and says he has to leave for a minute. The next time we see him he's babbling about something in a jail cell. How he got there... I have no idea. Then he listens to some country music while the woman janitor is asked out on a date by the head janitor.... what?

His perfect woman tries to sleep with the furnace repair man then we cut to the repair man crying in a bar about her leaving him... what? He really upset over this since she like his hair.... what? Then we see her wandering the roads of Carolina getting picked up by a man who drives a shady white van.... what?

The End.

I'm serious. That's how it ends.

This perfect woman is so not so much as "sweet and child-like" as completely inhuman. She has no empathy for other people beyond what she is taught by Brandon. I don't know if that is what he was going for, but there's no appeal to the character and it directly contradicts what Brandon is saying though his narration. Though her amazing pick-up line, “you're a man and I'm a woman” seems to work on just about everyone. And you thought Ash came up with that during Evil Dead 2. HA!

There's also more filler with a 5 minute country song and several montages of Brandon and his perfect woman hiking and having a boat ride.

There's quite a bit of gore in it but non of it is particularly any good (mostly due to budget restraints). It feels weird too to have all your gore on the first half of the film and then country montages on the second half.

Someone should have edited the country music during the gore. That would have been fun.

Speaking of editing.... oh boy. This is where the movie completely feels like an unfinished project. Characters stare at the camera several times, things wisp by the camera, scenes seem out of place, things are out of focus, lighting is inconsistent from cut to cut, and the clapper appears. Yes the clapper.

See...

There are some edits of the movie which edit the clapper out, in fact it's a scene where two characters never seen before talk about going out on a date to watch some wrastling. It's ill-conceived at best.

One neat thing about the movie is there is a character introduced early in the film when Brandon is out on his killing spree. It's a woman he meets at a restaurant whom he snubs in order to kill a different woman for her hands. That character reappears during the jail scene to gawk at him and show off her new boyfriend in a sort of moralistic twist. But in some ways it's a little stranger then that... you see she was played by Nita Patterson, Patterson's real wife. If Brandon is part of what Patterson could never be then that scene plays out on a different level. It's almost artistic.

If my assumption is correct (and it may not be) then in some ways “The Body Shop” is a small window into Patterson. Trying to be someone he wasn't, trying to a create not a woman that didn't exit but a world that didn't exist. This interpretation would also explain the semi-kind hunchback who is dragged along with promises of redemption and is ultimately destroyed.

Through all the gore, the horrible acting, and the unedited product there is something sweat and noble about the movie once you think about it for a bit. In some ways Patterson needed a little of Brandon in him. It was precisely that he contained non of that character that doomed the project. He was forced to work in an environment which could easily take advantage of his trusting nature, with almost no budget, and having to do more then his little talent could manage.

Well that and dying didn't help.