THE DEATHHEAD VIRGIN (1974) ½ *

Back in my early twenties, there used to be a place called Dawn’s Video that seemingly popped up out of nowhere in my hometown and didn’t really last very long compared to the other mom and pop video stores in the area.  They mostly had crap movies, but for a guy like me who practically lives for crap movies it was like a dream come true.  Unlike most video stores, they just kind of threw the empty, flattened-out boxes of the older releases and kept them in bins in the middle of the floor, so every time you went in there, it was like a scavenger hunt.  They also had a great deal:  Ten movies for ten days for ten dollars.  You couldn’t beat that.  Now because you’re getting ten movies, you often have to pad the last three or four movies out.  I mean for every Faces of Death, Death Race 2000, or Piranha there had to be more than a couple stinkers.  Let me tell you, folks.  The Deathhead Virgin was the granddaddy of all the Dawn’s Video stinkers.

During the 31 Days of Horror-Ween, I’ve been revisiting a few movies here and there.  I thought it might be fun to revisit a movie that I had once felt was the WORST MOVIE EVER when I first saw it and see how it holds up now.  At the time, I thought you couldn’t get any worse than The Deathhead Virgin.  Well, I’ve done a lot of living since then and have seen enough crappy movies in the past twenty years or so to know that’s no longer the case.  I now know there’s plenty worse movies out there than The Deathhead Virgin.  Not a lot mind you, but certainly plenty.

You know you’re in trouble in the first scene when one of my favorite unsung exploitation actors of all time, Vic Diaz shows up.  I don’t mean that in a disparaging way.  I mean I think of this guy as the Marlon Brando of the Philippines.  No, what is so distressing is the fact that the producers inexplicably dubbed his voice with another actor.  It’s a shame not only because he already had a distinct voice to begin with, but also because the guy they replaced his voice with sounds like a cut-rate Bela Lugosi impersonator. 

Jock Gaynor stars as a scuba diver who finds a skeleton (with a full head of hair, mind you) tied down spread eagle on a sunken ship.  He stupidly frees it, and it becomes a nude woman who wears only a mask that murders people.  His partner Larry Ward obtains a medallion found in the wreckage and the cursed trinket sometimes turns him into a killer too (usually just after he has a negative vision freak-out).

Director Norman Foster had a long and varied career.  He directed everything from Charlie Chan to Davy Crockett to the Green Hornet.  What he was doing in Manila directing what is essentially a vanity project for television star Gaynor masquerading as a horror film is anyone’s guess. 

The Deathhead Virgin is filled with long, boring, and hard-to-see underwater sequences.  If you think they’re bad though, just wait till you see the stuff that occurs on dry land.  The interminable dialogue scenes are dull and listless, and the cinematography is so dark and drab that the nighttime scenes look just as murky as the underwater sequences.  It all makes for a boring, confusing, slow-moving slog.

Speaking of slow-moving, the opening credits sequence is unnecessarily strung along for an entire fifteen minutes before the title even appears onscreen! 

The masked villainess is the only real memorable part.  While we’re on the subject of her memorable parts, they’re often indifferently lit, so it’s hard to see them.  Only the intermittent nudity keeps it from drifting into NO STARS territory.  I mean there’s a scene where Gaynor fights the nude killer underwater (talk about skin diving!), so it’s not completely without merit.

The big problem with The Deathhead Virgin is that just when you think it’s over, it isn’t.  The whole narrative winds up being a longwinded flashback.  Right when it feels like the movie should end, there’s still 25 minutes left, which is downright infuriating, mostly because it’s the slowest 25 minutes of your life (or the movie, take your pick).  If it had ended at the 70-minute mark, it might’ve skated by with ONE STAR, but unfortunately, it just keeps going. Of those last 25 minutes, you have to wait till the last 60 seconds for anything remotely horrific to happen.  Even then, it’s not even worth it.

I can’t say I enjoyed revisiting this one.  I don’t even know why I did.  (If only to reminisce about Dawn’s Video for a bit.)  If this review will prevent at least one person from watching The Deathhead Virgin, then at least my job here is done.