The Amazing Transplant

No, PERCY (1971) wasn't the first penis transplant movie. The sultana of sleaze, Doris Wishman (one of the only women directing exploitation movies at the time), directed and wrote this oddball softcore horror drama first. Arthur (Juan Fernandez) can't get it up, so he seeks the aid of a doctor who transplants his recently deceased friend's member onto him. Soon the operation goes sour and he finds himself in hiding after he kills his girlfriend. For some reason gold earrings set him off! In flashbacks, he seduces, rapes and/or murders other women. One is played by porn star Kim Pope. Another is a fat lesbian, and she gets sick after they do it and hovers over the toilet as Wishman's never-stable camera tilts down for a nice shot of the ladies zitty rear-end!

There's plenty here to entertain cult movie and Wishman fans (including lots of her trademark bizarre camera placements and tracking shots) and at times hints of (gasp!) substance rear their ugly head before being immediately trampled over by the next ridiculous or implausible plot move, terrible performance or laughable line of dialogue.

The version I saw was unrated, but could get a soft X rating for all of the soft core sex scenes and nudity.

Score (only if you're a sleazehound or Doris fan): 5 out of 10

A classic Wishman theme: male sexual insecurity plus female sexual desire (represented here by golden earrings) equals lots of violence. But somehow it's less intense than her earlier roughies, perhaps because of the larger cast or more frequent scene changes (invariably proceeded by "walking on the sidewalk" filler).

This is a movie about a man's penis, however that penis is never shown (what would Lacan say?). It falls into the category of "roughie," which is to say that the plot makes it sound nastier than what we actually see on the screen. Essentially, Arthur, a young virginal man who envies his friend's sexual prowess arranges to have the friend's penis transplanted to his own body when the friend conveniently dies of a rare virus. Having heard that his friend was really into women with gold earrings, Arthur finds that he can no longer control himself when any woman wears gold earrings, and he assaults them, rapes them, and sometimes kills them (it's not clear why he kills some and not others, except that some of them have to survive to tell the tale or the plot doesn't work). Of course, this being a smut film, all the women Arthur encounters wearing gold earrings are of course young and pretty. The rapes are also fairly tame, even by roughie standards, which I tend to attribute to the director, Doris Wishman (an actual woman as opposed to the many pseudonymous women in the business at the time). She also uses the movie as a means of exploring the many ways women respond to rape – some of them blame themselves, some of them are angry at the world, some of them decide they actually liked it after the fact, etc. She also touches on some interesting questions of the then-illegal status of abortion, as the doctor who performs this mad operation is an illegal abortion-doctor. Of course, Doris was no feminist, and this film is today mostly a goofy example of smut from a pre-penetration era, but there isn't another like it, even in the oeuvre of Edward D Wood.

This ridiculous, trashy thriller was helmed by the notorious Doris Wishman - here directing under a male pseudonym, Louis Silverman. A quarter of the shots are out-of-focus; the acting is wooden; she lensed it in such a way that most of the actors speak off-camera, so voices could be dubbed in post; when we do see lips moving, the dialogue is often out of synch. There are visual non-sequiturs and jump shots galore. At one point a woman falls dead when a strangler just barely touches her throat. The movie, in other words, is comically inept. There are half-a-dozen pretty nude bodies on display, but otherwise this is a real snoozer, from the Ed Wood school of directing. The ugly guy who is playing the detective investigator looks like a Muppet. Oddest feature for me is an poorly-chosen female chorus on the soundtrack, atop one of the rape scenes, that reminded me of Mia Farrow's title theme in Rosemary's Baby, also a little bit of one of the Country Joe McDonald pieces over a consensual love scene in Jens Jorgen Thorsen's Quiet Days in Clichy. The Amazing Transplant is strictly for connoisseurs of barrel-bottom cinematic trash - and even they may find this dull.

This is classic Doris Wishman - shots of dead air, horrible dubbing, impossibly bad acting, New York City streetscapes, and scene direction so terrible that'll it make you gasp. (Also expect a ton of her signature feet shots and eccentric art direction; this time around it involves a puzzling equestrian theme). Anyway, if you know Doris and like her take on gonzo sleaze, "The Amazing Transplant" is gonna be a fun time. Similar to "Bad Girls Go to Hell" "Deadly Weapons" and "Double Agent 73," this movie is, in its awfulness, pretty consistently funny. My only real complaint with "Transplant," as an unintentional comedy, is that the sex scenes are way too long. (Picture a 5-min scene between two ugly people, most of which comprises shots of the guy's bare arse. Yeah...). That said, expect to fast forward through some parts. It is worth it, though, because almost every scene is laughable in some way. (The scene with the killer's mom, whose dress sports multiple mustard stains, had us laughing heartily). If you are new to Doris Wishman, and feel up to the task of viewing some of the poorest film-making imaginable, I'd start with "Bad Girls Go to Hell," because it showcases all the signatures of the Wishman style, minus half the sleaziness of "Transplant." If you had a good time with "Bad Girls," and weren't offended or anything, queue up "The Amazing Transplant." This is unintentional surrealism at its sleazy finest. Further proof that Wishman was, alongside Coleman Francis, America's most inept film director.