The Scare Salon

I assumed, just from a quick read of the synopsis, that the movie was going to be something along the lines of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face or Jesús Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orloff, and I was partially right, but this film also had something of a Southern Gothic angle to it which I really dug. The subject matter is pretty lurid and strains credulity at times, and the main protagonist is an unapologetic shitheel of the highest order, but honestly, those aspects ended up not being negatives at all, and in fact, I kinda feel like they were my favorite overall things about this film.

Now, I’m not sure if the version I watched (which someone had uploaded to YouTube in nice quality) has been edited for content; I heard that the original film had more nudity, but this version does show some surgical-type gore, so I’m not really sure what the deal is. Although this movie did get a VHS release back in the day, it was never released on DVD as far as I know and has remained pretty obscure since then, which is kind of a shame. It’s not a lost masterpiece or anything, but it’s actually pretty damn good and has some awesome acting performances by the two leads.

Robert Lansing, who I recognized from Empire of the Ants and some episodes of the original Star Trek, plays a plastic surgeon named Dr. Phillip Reynolds. From the very beginning, you get the sense that the good doctor is a bit of a sociopath, but to Robert Lansing’s credit, he plays the character with such restraint and subtlety that you can’t help almost liking the guy; in other words, he doesn’t come across like an arrogant, cackling villain.

Not long into the film, we learn that Phillip’s wife has died in a supposed “accident,” and that he has a grown daughter named Heather (played by Judith Chapman, mainly known for her numerous soap opera roles) who ran away from home a year previously and hasn’t contacted anyone in the family since. In a flashback sequence, we also discover that the reason the poor girl skedaddled is that dear old Daddy caught her and her boyfriend having sex, and then Daddy drowned the boyfriend in a pond on the property, making the whole thing look like the kid got drunk and wandered into the water on his own. As you can imagine, Heather needed some time alone to process that shit.

Phillip’s wealthy father-in-law, who always (correctly) blamed Phillip for his daughter’s death, passes away, and in his will, he leaves absolutely nothing to Phillip or to his own son Bradley (who is also Phillip’s brother-in-law). However, he does leave a whopping five million smackers to his beloved granddaughter Heather. The only problem is that nobody knows exactly where Heather is.

Fortuitously, Phillip and Bradley are driving around one night commiserating about getting shafted in the old coot’s will when they stumble across an opportunity. See, there’s a stripper at a club who is getting her face absolutely caved in by a big bouncer dude for reasons that are left unexplained. Seriously, it’s pretty brutal, as he basically just bashes her face into a concrete wall numerous times until her head is nothing but a mass of bloody pulp. The young woman staggers out into the street and happens to collapse right in front of Phillip’s car. Phillip and Bradley rush to help her, taking her to the nearby hospital where Phillip works and getting her sorted out.

Phillip does actually seem to want to help this woman, who is called Jane Doe for the rest of the movie, but when he realizes that she doesn’t really remember who she is and doesn’t seem to have any family or friends who are looking for her, the doctor hits upon a slightly unethical scheme. He figures that since he has no idea what this woman looked like before she got her shit pushed in, he might as well reconstruct her face to look exactly like that of his daughter Heather. And while he’s at it, he also might as well train her to talk and act like Heather, all the better to claim that five million bucks left to Heather by her dead granddaddy.

The recovery process takes a while, and initially, Jane Doe is pretty skeeved out by the doctor and his sketchy machinations. However, the promise of splitting five million dollars with this leering creep is too tempting to pass up, so she finally agrees.

Phillip takes Jane back to his house so she can finish healing up, and he also starts instructing her on how to be Heather. He plays recordings of Heather’s voice, makes Jane copy samples of her handwriting, and quizzes her about all the relatives in this huge, old-money, Southern family. These are all people who have known Heather all their lives, and Jane is really going to have to be at the top of her game to fool them.

Jane actually does a commendable job of imitating Heather and is easily able to pass for Phillip’s missing daughter. Her only downfall is that the real Heather is a piano virtuoso, and Jane can only play “Chopsticks.” This nearly gets her into trouble when, at a family party celebrating her comeback, Bradley insists on her playing something impromptu. Phillip is able to get her out of it by saying that she had some kind of shock while she was away and temporarily lost her ability to play, but it’s clear that Bradley is a little suspicious.

Despite the setbacks, though, Phillip and Jane are able to successfully convince the family lawyers to hand the inheritance over to Jane, and just as planned, she immediately makes a gift of half the money to Phillip. The pair then happily returns to Phillip’s palatial mansion, go to Six Flags to ride roller coasters, and oh yeah…they also start fucking. Which…ew. I mean, they’re not related, obviously, but it’s pretty weird for a middle-aged dude to start having sex with a woman half his age who’s the exact clone of his daughter, right? Like, there’s just so much to unpack there. And believe me, it gets ickier as the movie goes on; this is a Southern Gothic, after all.

So remember how I said that Bradley was starting to suspect that “Heather” is not really who she appears to be? Well, he turns up unannounced at Phillip’s house one night while no one’s home; he just waits in the parlor for them, getting drunk and angry. Recall that not only did Bradley think it was strange that “Heather” couldn’t play the piano like she used to, but he was also with Phillip when they found the stripper with the smashed-up face, so he was able to put two and two together and determine that this “Heather” is an impostor.

Now, you might think that Phillip and Jane are gonna have to kill Bradley to keep him from ratting on them, but it turns out that they don’t exactly need to. Bradley has a heart condition for which he takes medication, and he ends up getting so drunk and worked up about the whole situation that his heart begins to give out. All Phillip does is refuse to hand him his medicine, and then he watches coldly as Bradley expires on the floor. Again, it appears to simply be a tragic, natural death, and the quasi-incest brigade is supposedly in the clear again.

But then, a wrinkle appears in the form of the real Heather, who shows up at Bradley’s funeral but keeps on the down-low for the time being. She then returns to Phillip’s house while no one’s home and cooks him a big dinner to surprise him. Phillip is overjoyed to see his daughter at long last, and Heather, for her part, acts like it’s not bizarre at all that her father is fucking a woman who looks exactly like her. In fact, from the interactions between father and daughter, it’s pretty clear that Phillip had the hots for his daughter all along, which goes a long way toward explaining why he killed her boyfriend the year before.

Heather was apparently unaware that her grandfather had died and left her all that money, so Phillip simply lies to her and says that the old bastard actually left all the loot to a local college and no one in the family got a red cent. As time goes on, Jane begins to perceive that she’s kinda become a third wheel now that Heather’s back and she fears that the young woman might interfere with the scheme that she and Phillip have going.

Mindful of Jane’s mounting anxiety, Phillip reassures her that he’s hired a hitman to have Heather killed, and there’s actually a pretty great sequence where the supposed hitman, masquerading as a plumber, turns up at the house when Heather is there alone.

Meanwhile, Phillip and Jane are out spending the day at the lake, and there are a couple of suspenseful fake-outs when you think that Phillip has actually drowned Jane like he did to his wife and Heather’s boyfriend. But no, she’s fine, and she seems happy knowing that while she’s doing the backstroke in her skimpy red bikini, Heather is being put out of the way permanently back at the house.

Not so fast, though. Turns out the plumber was an actual plumber and not a hitman at all, and also turns out that Phillip actually hired a local cop to pull him and Jane over on their way back from the lake. He pretends he doesn’t know Jane and that she’s just some hitchhiker he picked up, and then the cop tries to cuff her, but she runs off. The cop gives chase, and it becomes obvious that Phillip has paid the cop to kill her instead of his daughter.

We don’t actually see what happens to Jane yet, but Phillip goes back to the house and tells Heather that Jane drowned accidentally (which seems to be a theme with him) and that now it’s just the two of them. He then tries to rape his own daughter (EW…told you it was gonna get ickier) but is stopped cold when Jane pops up behind him and clobbers him with a cast iron skillet.

I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it might have been implied here that Jane and Heather had switched places for this whole scenario, which would mean that it was actually Heather at the lake with her dad and Jane who almost got raped. Not that it makes the shit any better, because Phillip tried to jump on her thinking it was his daughter, but I’m just saying.

So now comes the exposition. While Heather was away that whole year, she was actually in a sanitarium; the only person in the family who knew she was there was her grandfather, so of course she knew that he had died, and she knew he had left her all his money. Anyway, Heather’s therapist tried to convince her to report her father for murdering her boyfriend, but she evidently wanted to get revenge on him in her own way. So when she came back home and got wind of the whole Jane situation, she figured she could use it to her advantage. While the two young women seemed to hate each other at first, it seems that offscreen they were becoming allies and decided to work together to fuck Phillip over.

After Phillip wakes up from getting his melon bashed in, Heather and her therapist are there, and they very calmly tell Phillip that Jane was a figment of his imagination, a sick fantasy constructed out of the desire to bang his own daughter. The more they tell Phillip this, the more off the rails he goes (I mean, he wasn’t the most sane person to start with, so it’s not like he had far to go), until he’s finally reduced to a gibbering mess who keeps seeing hallucinations of all the people he killed, including his wife, the boyfriend, and Bradley. Phillip is unceremoniously carted off to the bughouse in a straitjacket.

In the end, Jane and Heather split the five million bucks, Heather remains behind in her family estate, and Jane sashays off into the sunset, a very wealthy woman.

As I said, this isn’t an undiscovered classic by any means, but it is a pretty riveting and alluringly trashy Southern Gothic horror thriller. Robert Lansing is absolutely stellar as the psychopathic main character, just charming enough that you can’t stop watching him, but also shady as hell and a gross pervert. Judith Chapman is also sensational in her dual roles; she plays the characters very similarly, obviously, since one is supposed to be impersonating the other, but she also gives each character subtle little tells so you can always determine which is which.

While some of the plot twists stretched believability a bit, I didn’t really find anything too egregious here, and exaggerated narratives like this are fairly standard for the Southern Gothic genre anyway. So if you’re looking for a fairly obscure 70s horror with some Old South flair and skin-crawling family dynamics, Scalpel might be just what the sociopathic plastic surgeon ordered.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.