 805 - THE THING THAT COULDN’T DIE
Genre: Low-Budget Horror (1958, B&W)
Synopsis: On a ranch, a young, prone-to-hysterics, blonde woman has the ability to find water using a Y-shaped
divining rod (I remember trying “dowsing” as a kid
– what a bunch of nonsense!).
So the rest of the people on the ranch look to her to find water but instead of
H20, she finds something evil!
Buried underground is an old sealed wooden chest that everyone thinks contains treasure.
Of course, instead of opening it right away, they take it back to the ranch and put it in a utility
closet for safe keeping. During the night, one of the farm hands along with Mike, the big dumb ox of a farm hand, sneaks in to open the chest.
Mike opens the chest and inside is a human head that hypnotizes him.
Mike kills the other farm hand and takes the head outside into the woods.
The others awaken to find that the chest is empty and there is blood on the floor (not the new carpet!).
They discover the dead farm hand’s body and the police are called in to look for the main suspect:
Big Dumb Mike.
Meanwhile, the Head is directing Dumb Mike to hold it up to the window of the hot-looking brunette on the ranch so he can
be a peeping tom... and hypnotize her too. Now that the
brunette is hypnotized, she joins the Head and Dumb Mike in the woods.
Because that the police are snooping around looking for Dumb Mike, the Head directs
Dumb Mike to sacrifice himself by attacking the police, who shoot him down.
And, so the police call off their search of the woods. The brunette is taking care of the Head now by hiding it in a hatbox in her closet while she tries to convince the blonde girl to give her the special old cross necklace she was given that was also found on the ranch.
The blonde girl refuses and, at some point, goes into the woods where she sees a vision from 400 years earlier of a devil-worshipper having
his head cut off by a group of men, the leader of whom is wearing the special cross necklace she has.
I guess this gets her to take it off and the next thing you know, the brunette introduces the blonde to the hypnotizing powers of the Head.
Now the blonde uses her divining rod powers to find the coffin containing the
Head’s body.
The others dig up the coffin and take it back to the ranch, placing it in the living room.
(Wouldn’t the garage have been a better place for the dirt-encrusted coffin?)
They open it and the body sits up – it’s still alive – then the blonde girl returns the Head to it (I guess the Head and Body had Velcro or something on them because the Head attaches itself right on).
The dead devil-worshipper is back and he needs a body to drink blood from.
But, before you know it, one of the men puts the old cross necklace in his face, which somehow kills him.
Don’s Review: What can I say about this awful film? The scenes with the wide-eyed Head hypnotizing everyone
are pretty ridiculous and the climax of the movie is not only extremely anti-climactic, but also extremely short (my response was:
THIS is what we were building up to???). Why
didn’t the Head just hypnotize everyone in the room in that last scene???
The riffing on this is pretty good overall and the host segments are
surprisingly
enjoyable – even the Mad segments – as this is when the SOL goes to the planet of the
Observers, a race who just “observe” things while holding their brains in a bowl (they are one of the better inventions on the show).
One of the better episodes of the Sci-Fi era.
Trivia Note: The script to this feature was written by David Duncan, who also wrote the scripts to two other MST3K features,
episode #113 - The Black Scorpion and
episode #802 - The Leech Woman, and went on to write the script to one of my favorite old sci-fi movies,
Fantastic Voyage (so at least he got a little bit better at
writing eventually).
Don’s Rating: 
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