Following discussion of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974) in my last post, here is a Friday Five dedicated to a horrible horror movie staple…

HOW TO GET AHEAD

1) Keith Jennings, THE OMEN (1976)
David Warner comes a cropper at the hands of a Satanic glazier (no, not that one).

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAD?
Living in a high-risk burglary area, Warner keeps it positioned in the dining room window to ward off potential thieves.

2) Khartoum, THE GODFATHER (1972)
As Cerys Matthews once confessed: “I put horses’ heads in people’s beds, ’cause I am the mob”. Unbelievably Matthews is still at large. Luca Brasi, however, sleeps with the fishes for beheading this champion racehorse and depositing it in the bed of its movie producer owner Jack Woltz. ‘Khartoum’ is a reference to Charles Gordon, the British commander of Khartoum who was captured by Sudanese rebels and beheaded in 1885.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAD?
After a few beers at parties Khartoum was known to attach it to his backside so no one could tell which way he was facing.

3) Dr Hill, RE-ANIMATOR (1985)
Adapted from the H.P.Lovecraft story ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’, this eighties gore-fest sees the sinister Dr Hill (David Gale) decapitated by shovel resulting in cinema’s first (only?) visual pun. What’s worse than being sexually assaulted by a disembodied head? How about being sexually assaulted by a disembodied head that looks like John Kerry?

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAD?
Kim Newman wanted it for a door stop but a phone bid came in from Tokyo at the last minute.

4) The Fire Gang, LABYRINTH (1986)
Jennifer Connelly must fight her way through the labyrinth to the castle beyond the Goblin city to take back the child stolen by the Goblin King (that sentence best read in a David Bowie voice a-wuzza wuzza). Along the way she encounters ‘the fire gang’, bright red monsters with the ability to remove their heads and limbs and chuck them around with the help of some pretty ropey eighties CSO. Easily the most terrifying thing on this list.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEADS?
Bowie uses them as freaky goblin paperweights to keep his cosmic affairs in order.

NOGGIN MY LIFETIME, MATE

5) A SEVERED HEAD (1970)
A second appearance on the same list for Lee Remick, but decapitation enthusiasts should steer clear of this adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s satirical novel that was a harbinger of the 1960s sexual revolution: it contains no actual severed heads. It’s a metaphor, or something.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAD?
You weren’t listening were you.