Full disclosure, I intended to write a very serious piece this week about how the new Oscar rules are largely symbolic and wouldn’t have even excluded most of the Best Picture nominees of the last decade and that the only path to real change was adding several thousand voters who weren’t 90 year old white men. But then I uncovered something so bizarre and pointless that I couldn’t let another day pass without writing about it.
I’ve been reading a lot of old horror comics recently because I’ve decided the only way I’m going to skirt a nervous breakdown this year is if the next eight months or so are Halloween. A lot of the great horror comics haven’t made the jump to digital yet because the focus understandably seems to be on digitizing the giant backlog of super hero comics before anything else. But there are still some gems out there, like the 70’s horror anthology series Black Magic.
I’ve only read five or six issues, but from what I can tell there’s basically one narrative arc to every Black Magic story: A seemingly regular person is secretly a monster and/or mutant. After several pages explaining how strange and terrifying they are, a group of men show up and shoot them with rifles until they’re a significantly less strange and terrifying puddle of goop.
That’s exactly how “Head of The Family” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby plays out. We open on a budding romance between young lovers Francie and Hugan, and one of the best descriptions of an attractive man I’ve ever read.
“If one could admire the fine fierce head of the hunter hawk, it was possible to be drawn to Hugan!” Feels like it could only be written by someone who is permanently banned from the bird enclosure at the zoo.
We then meet Hugan’s siblings, Hugel, Hugard, and…Huguette? And learn about reclusive uncle Hugo, who hides away in a room that Francie is never allowed to enter. Because he’s just a giant head, like on the cover of the book, and the siblings are secretly various parts of his body that he controls telepathically. It’s a tale as old as time.
Francie figures this out a few pages later and flees the house in terror just in time for the falling action to show up with their rifles and massacre every other character in the story.
This is all honestly a fairly pedestrian level of weird for a classic horror comic, but this story in particular jumped out at me because I remembered watching the first 15 minutes of a Full Moon Features film with the same title over a year ago. In fact, not only is the title the same, the movie cover art is remarkably similar to the old comic cover.
What’s strange is that the Kirby and Simon story isn’t credited anywhere in the film, and outside of one of the most painfully detailed synopses in the history of Wikipedia, there’s very little written about the movie or the story it’s clearly borrowing from anywhere on the internet. If this is indeed plagiarized, and I can’t say definitively that it is, nobody seems to care. Jack Kirby died in 1994, two years before the release of the film, and Full Moon Features has produced such an impossible volume of B-movies since the 90s that I would be stunned if even they remember this one.
I decided that for the sake of science I had to watch the movie all the way through and see how faithful it is to the source material. As it turns out, it is an extremely faithful adaptation right down to the psychically controlled siblings. But the story is about 89 pages short of a typical movie script, so once they’ve covered the entirety of the source material, the remainder of the runtime is filled in with sheer lunacy.
This thing is nearly unwatchable. My standards for quality are obscenely, notoriously low, but all the same, my brain carefully put on its hat and coat and started dramatically checking its watch about halfway into Head of The Family.
After the big reveal that one of the characters is a giant head in a chair, the movie basically becomes a hacky Double Indemnity clone but with a giant head in a chair. I know that sounds like the greatest thing ever made, so you’re just going to have to trust me when I say it’s mostly glassy-eyed stares and several strange, fully clothed sex scenes that drag on far longer than anyone could possibly want them to.
What’s truly baffling about all this is that Jack Kirby is one of the greatest and most prolific comic creators of any era. He is remembered most fondly for his incredible imagination and has hundreds of intellectual properties to his name. This is one of the few that nobody has discussed with any interest since it was first printed and I can’t imagine why anyone would rush out to make a movie of it. Whether this idea was purchased or outright stolen it is still a wild way to cash in on a famous creator’s work. It’s like coming across George R. R. Martin vomiting in an alley and taking a picture of the vomit to sell as a t-shirt design.
We’ve been far too cruel to the Fantastic Four franchise, Head of The Family is without a doubt the worst comic book adaptation of all time.
Splorchtown 