In the 1970s, a television commercial for a margarine indistinguishable from butter played ad nauseam, pushing its tagline into everyday culture: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” In The Mutations, Donald Pleasence learns why (minus the vegetable oil spreads, of course).
As Dr. Nolter, university professor and maddest of mad scientists, he seeks to create a new species by fusing man with plant. If that means “recruiting” his own students for hands-on testing, much to the detriment of enrollment numbers, so be it.
Notler acquires specimen by enlisting the kidnapping services of little person Michael Dunn (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks) and hulking, hatted monstrosity Tom Baker (weeks from donning the fedora as TV’s Doctor Who). Those mismatched men co-own a circus of “freaks,” which includes a bearded lady, frog man, gator woman and so on. Whichever experiments fail, Nolter gifts back to them — a textbook example of mutually beneficial business.
Rare is the film with the power to immerse the viewer in its environment. In the case of The Mutations, however, said surroundings are a rather dull college science lecture we can’t leave. The first 10 minutes of the movie pairs Pleasence’s (Halloween) wilted yammering with time-lapse footage of blooming flora and sprouting shrooms. The pace picks up a bit once Nolter’s in his lab, feeding live bunnies to his giant Venus flytrap, a monstrosity so shoddily constructed, it looks like an Audrey II from a Little Shop of Horrors production staged by the Kids of Widney High.
Like Nolter attempting to splice this with that, helmer Jack Cardiff (The Girl on the Motorcycle) attempts the same in merging the science and circus plots. Neither quite works on its own, and especially not together — I mean, they do in that a result results, but it hardly operates as intended. In fact, it killed Cardiff’s short-lived directorial career, sending him back to the more fertile ground of cinematography.
Also known as The Freakmaker, a moniker that can’t help but make you think of Mentos, this out-of-touch creature feature isn’t exactly blossoming with surprises; when Scott Antony (Dead Cert) jokes in Act 1 after class, “I don’t want to be a vegetable,” we instantly know his fate. Others with potential for plucking include stunning Hammer starlets Julie Ege (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires), Olga Anthony (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) and Jill Haworth (Brides of Dracula), plus sword-and-sandal refugee Brad Harris (Goliath Against the Giants), who also produced. —Rod Lott