THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)
The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.
SSSSSSS (1973)
Back in the early 1970s, when concern about global climate change was such an obscure topic that Al Gore was still jacking up the air conditioner to "frosty" and demanding to know "When the hell does it warm up around here?", Dr. Carl Stoner was on the case. Doc Stoner, played by the much-loved and deeply untrustworthy character actor Strother Martin, suspects that a new Ice Age might be coming, and he has his own radical plan for helping the human race to adjust to changing circumstances: he's working on a serum that will turn us all into king cobras. Unfortunately, the good doctor leaves himself open to charges that he lets his personal feelings guide his scientific process: he selects as his first test subject Dirk Benedict (later known as Face on The A-Team), who just happens to have been sniffing around the doctor's young daughter, played by Heather Menzies, who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses. (This being an early-70s exploitation movie, she ends up taking off a lot more than her glasses.) Soon Benedict is stumbling around the lab with a greenish complexion, scaly flaking skin, and his hair falling out, which in my experience would be enough to ensure that Heather Menzies would cut him off even if he didn't wind up turning into a snake.
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)
Generally speaking, sexually transformative surgery has gotten a bad rap in the movies; Ed Wood did very little to glamorize the field with his 1953 first feature, Glen or Glenda (A.K.A. I Changed My Sex), where the whole point seemed to be to transform a repressive society to make it acceptable for men with pencil-line moustaches to indulge their passion for Angora sweaters. Things hadn't gotten much better by the early seventies, when the writer-director Michael Sarne (compared by one of his colleagues to "a wolf with rabies") committed this blasphemous version of Gore Vidal's classic Pop novel. In Sarne's telling, Myron, played by film writer and Gong Show staple Rex Reed, goes under the knife and comes out as Myra, played by Raquel Welch. It would take a special commission composed of cooler heads than my own to decide whether, for the patient, that amounts to a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. Incidentally, the surgeon is played by the venerable John Carradine, who must have felt comfortable in the role, because two years later, he played the medical sex researcher in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, who was engaged in such nefarious pursuits as "taking the brain from the head of a lesbian and putting it in the body of a man who works for the telephone company."
RABID (1977)
No list of movie medical mishaps would be complete without a bow to the work of David Cronenberg. In his debut feature, the 1975 Shivers (A.K.A. They Came from Within), a doctor working with parasitic transplants that he hopes will liberate an overly straitlaced society succeeds so well that he turns a Montreal apartment complex into a mindless rolling orgy that sets out, at the end of the movie, to infect the larger world. In his 1979 The Brood, a maverick psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) coaches his prize pupil into channeling her unresolved anger until she begins literally giving birth to murderous creatures who are pure products of her rage. Rabid is sort of the worst of both worlds, plus maybe a few more worlds you never would have thought of without David's kind help. Porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays an accident victim who winds up in the hands of a plastic surgeon looking to try out an experimental skin grafting technique. It somehow causes her to grow a phallus-like organ beneath her armpit, which she uses to impale people and feed, vampire-like, on their blood. Her victims in turn become frothing, murderous lunatics, who run amok like the infected people in Shivers, except not as friendly. If there's a common theme running through Cronenberg's early work, it may be the message, "Even if you don't like his movies, you can at least take heart that, thank God, he didn't become a doctor!"
SPECIAL BONUS BEST-- BEST PROGRAM OF MEDICAL REFORM:
THE HOSPITAL (1971)
This black comedy, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is set in a beleaguered Manhattan teaching hospital that's going to the dogs. The Chief of Medicine, Dr. Herbert Beck (George C. Scott), has to deal not only with the "radiant" bungling of his staff (exemplified by a pompous, strutting quack named Welbeck) but with a mysterious string of deaths among his staff members, whose bodies keep turning up in hospital beds and sprawled across chairs in the emergency waiting room. It's all right, though: it turns out that the staff members are being picked off by a saintly madman (Bernard Hughes) who, having suffered as a patient in the hospital, has been sort-of-murdering the doctors by putting them in situations where they'd be all right if they were subjected to timely care and basic competence, which he recognizes as supremely unlikely. Learning the truth, Dr. Beck points this reformer in the direction of Dr. Welbeck and wishes him godspeed.
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