Flint, Michigan’s renowned coronary specialist, Dr. James Arnold (Cal Seely), could be having a better week. The international medical community is skeptical of his research into heart transplants. His molasses-slow elderly benefactor, Mrs. Woodruff (Roz Kramer), is threatening to freeze funds if she doesn’t see results before her heart sputters out. And back home, his coulda-been-a-contender brother, Tom Arnold (!), is allowing his rentable tramps to raid the doc’s liquor cabinet.
Things look up when Tom (Dick Grimm) accidentally kills some broad, giving Dr. Arnold a chance to take that girl’s ticker and give it to Mrs. Woodruff. Cue the title: Night of the Bloody Transplant, which we see in about two minutes of footage of an actual open-heart surgery. Never mind that it doesn’t match; how a 20-something woman suddenly has the chest of an 80-year-old man is not on director David W. Hanson’s mind.
What is, one assumes, is stealing wholesale from Mexico’s then-recent Night of the Bloody Apes and hitting the magical feature-length mark. With no working knowledge of plot, Hanson (whose only other pic is sexploitation’s Judy) packs a whole lot of nothing into 71 minutes, with such filmed-in-full bar entertainments as several crooned songs, body-painting performance art and a hoochie-coochie striptease down to the pasties.
Although a few scene transitions verge on cleverness, Hanson has little business operating a camera, just as his all-amateur cast has no business standing in front of one. Given its nonexistent sound mix and predominance of wood paneling, Transplant reeks of smut, but isn’t. More crime film than horror, it also isn’t on the level of Herschell Gordon Lewis, following the man’s low-budget template of gore, but ignoring the knowing sense of humor that usually overcame all technical deficiencies. —Rod Lott