The 10 Craziest Mad Doctor Surgeries In Movies

Aside from morbid fetishists and implant-happy people with low self-esteem, no one likes to go under the knife. What’s pleasurable about lying helpless on a slab as some highly paid stranger cuts into your flesh and rearranges some of your parts? Imagining one’s self getting hacked up by a medically trained man or woman concealed by a white mask makes a trip to the dentist seem like time spent inside a tickling salon, so leave it up to perverse movie directors and screenwriters to exploit the uncomfortable situation for the sake of disconcerting entertainment.

The latest filmmaker to dabble in the terrors of malpractice is Pedro Almodóvar, the much-admired Spanish auteur who’s received heaps of critical hugs and kisses for films such as Volver (2006) and Broken Embraces (2009). His new flick, The Skin I Live In (opening in limited release this Friday), is a quasi-horror work about a heartbroken plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) who performs sexually twisted operations on the gorgeous woman (Elena Anaya) he’s held prisoner in his Toledo mansion for six years.

One of the year’s strangest and oddly sensitive movies, The Skin I Live In taps into the darker side of medical experimentation. Almodóvar’s kinky genre piece also takes cues from a slew of classic flicks, a few of which appear on our list of The 10 Craziest Mad Doctor Surgeries In Movies.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

With her 1818 novel Frankenstein, author Mary Shelley created horror’s most iconic monster, a patchwork zombie constructed from limbs acquired through grave-robbing. In 1990, schlock master Frank Henenlotter paid homage to Shelley’s classic tale the only way he knew how: by replacing the book’s elegance with trashy characters, sexploitative bloodshed, and a former Penthouse Pet (co-star Patty Mullen).

Tweaking Shelley’s plot quite a bit, Frankenhooker is the heartwarming story of a medical school dropout whose loving wife gets mangled in a lawnmower accident; beside himself, the guy, conveniently named Jeffrey Franken, stashes her decapitated head and goes out slaughtering call girls for their below-the-neck body parts. Once “Frankenhooker” is born, though, all the horny creature does is kill men while satisfying her sexual urges. If she was alive today, we’re sure Mary Shelley would be proud.

In the spirit of Bride Of Frankenstein, the exaggeratedly gory 1990 horror-comedy Bride Of Re-Animator depicts the pitfalls of trying to create the perfect woman. Here, doctors Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) gather loose female body parts and employ the substance whipped up by Wise in 1985’s superior Re-Animator to revive the reassembled lady.

Bride Of Re-Animator proves a vital point: There’s no such thing as “making the perfect woman.” Think about it—if you were to medically carry out those “What’s your type?” fantasies, the end result would be a hideous monstrosity. Picture what a sowed together beast comprised of Nicki Minaj’s ass, Kate Upton’s rack, and Adriana Lima’s face would look like. And then imagine waking up next to that in the morning.

Here’s one lesson to take away from this list: If you’re hoping to never have to perform a revolting surgery on anyone, keep your significant other away from steering wheels. The most overused set-up for dark surgery flicks is definitely the “wife/daughter gets badly injured in a car accident,” which is precisely the set-up of the super campy 1962 romp The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also the benefactor of a wonderfully goofy title.

In this case, Dr. Cortner’s (Jason Evers) wife loses her head—literally—in an automobile wreck; not ready to say goodbye to his love, the doctor finds the severed head and revives it in his lab. The wife’s dome-piece is kept alive in a liquid-filled jar, where it stays while the medically certified hubby goes on seek-and-kill missions to find a new female body to attach the head onto.

That’s not the movie’s crazy surgery, though, since Cortner never gets the opportunity to see his plan through. As we find out during the film’s third act, the doc has performed other bodily transplant surgeries in the past, one of which resulted in a gigantic creature with a deformed and previously decapitated human head that hides out in Cortner’s laboratory and ultimately kills the doctor on his wife-head’s orders. A second lesson to remember: Even with nothing more than a head to their name, women can still ruin a man’s dreams.

Robert Ledgard, the surgeon played by Antonio Banderas in acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s kinkily bizarre The Skin I Live In, hasn’t had the easiest domestic life. First, his wife suffered extreme facial burns after a car accident, and then, once she caught a glimpse of her charcoal face in a mirror, she killed herself by jumping out of a window. Years later, Ledgard’s daughter, who witnessed the mother's suicide firsthand, gets raped during a wedding reception, descends into a state of lunacy, and ends her life a la mommy.

So how does Ledgard react to life’s one-two wallop of trauma? By seeking a therapist’s counsel? No, sir—he kidnaps the rapist, imprisons the son-of-a-bitch in the dungeon-like basement of his mansion, and gives dude a gender overhaul, turning him into the spitting image of Ledgard’s deceased spouse.

We don’t know what’s worse: Almodóvar’s unbelievably sick imagination, or how attracted we are to the rapist’s post-surgery appearance. Our reasoning for the latter: She (or he, whichever) is played by the ultra sexy Spanish actress Elena Anaya. Whatever helps us sleep at night, right?

Legendary sci-fi/horror author H.G. Wells’ 1986 novel The Island Of Dr. Moreau has been adapted into three films to date, including the horrendous 1996 version that starred a near-death Marlon Brando and an about-to-fall-off Val Kilmer. The best cinematic take on Wells’ book is by far director Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 triumph, a major genre achievement that’s rarely mentioned alongside the great '30s horror classics Frankenstein and Dracula. That’s quite the fail.

The excellent Charles Laughton stars as Dr. Moreau, a morally corrupt scientist who spends his time on a deserted island trying to turn animals into humans, which regularly misfires and produces half-man, half-beast hybrids. The makeup effects on the monsters, one of which is played by Count Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, is primitive by today’s evolved standards, which is totally fine. Lugosi and his angry co-stars resemble poor man’s wolf-men (think Lon Chaney Jr.), but their intensely savage performances during the film’s anti-Moreau climax lend them a collective scariness that shits upon modern-day CGI monsters.

Director Lee Frost and the rest of his The Thing With Two Heads team might have thought they were making an outlandish yet meaningful statement about race relations when they assembled this cheapo ’70s exploitation flick. If so, mission nowhere near accomplished.

We’d like to think that they had less pretentious intentions. The silly film’s plot is hilariously absurd: An old, dying honky (Ray Milland) requests to have his head placed onto a healthy person’s body, but his noggin ends up getting attached the body of a plus-sized black dude (Rosey Grier). And, naturally, the Caucasian half isn’t at all pleased that his brain-box has been put next to that of “one of those people”; the black guy, meanwhile, is just happy that he’s avoided death via electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit.

The Thing With Two Heads straddles the line between schlocky horror and action-filled Blaxploitation; the fact that it doesn’t settle onto either side of said line is a non-factor. Taken as a ridiculous piece of grindhouse cinema, it’s a racially obvious and surgically illogical laugh machine.

Tom Six, the writer and director of last year’s hot-topic The Human Centipede (First Sequence), tried his best to ensure that his vile little horror flick would be taken seriously. Well, seriously enough—it’s hard to award credence to a movie in which a guy defecates into a girl’s mouth. The filmmaker’s plan was to map out all of deranged former surgeon Dr. Heiter’s (Dieter Laser) medical tactics for the audience, through the character’s own words and actions.

Using a large erase board, Heiter shows his three young victims a diagram illustrating exactly how he’d join them together in a butt-to-gums formation; basically, he’d cut their kneecaps (to make permanently walking on knees that much more possible) and stitch the back two sucker’s mouths to the derriere in front of them.

Which he does, though Six displays minor restraint and doesn’t show all of Heiter’s surgical action (Six saved all of the disgusting nitty-gritty for the just released sequel). Yet the after-shock of seeing a moving, hazardously functioning “human centipede” is quite shocking in its own right. Would such a procedure actually work? Mr. Six seems to think so, having given his nasty film the tagline of, “100% Medically Accurate.” We’ll gladly just take his word for it.

Literature junkies know the late Michael Crichton as the prolific author behind such lauded novels as Jurassic Park, Congo, and Sphere; what’s not so universally recognized, however, is Crichton’s filmography amassed as a movie director. The writer-turned-filmmaker’s best feature is Coma, a taut, paranoid thriller about one of the least ethical hospitals in all of film.

Coma, also written by Crichton, concerns a Boston surgical resident who uncovers her place of employment’s illegal and evil secret: Patients who check in for common surgeries are left in a vegetative state after their oxygen is replaced by carbon monoxide, a maneuver necessary to cut out the unjustifiably comatose patient’s organs for black market sales.

The lifeless bodies don’t just lie in the hospital beds the whole time, though; they’re relocated to a separate facility where the bodies are suspended in mid-air thanks to electrical wires latched onto the person’s long bones. Makes you want to reconsider that penis enlargement surgery, doesn’t it?

Esteemed writer-director David Cronenberg became cinema’s almighty king of physical grotesqueries with his earlier films, which intelligently and gruesomely presented the many ways in which flesh can be violated. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that only one of Cronenberg’s bodily horror pictures features doctors for main characters. That film is the critically embraced Dead Ringers, one of Cronenberg’s more cerebral and sexual works. Jeremy Irons plays twin brothers, both gynecologists, who use their interchangeable appearances to manipulate a sexy new female patient (Genevieve Bujold) who's suffering from an abnormal reproductive system that prevents her from getting pregnant.

The film’s weirdest scene shows one of the brothers putting his self-made “mutant” tools to use on the lady, who ironically has twin vaginas. Puncturing her lower-half’s nether area, the unstable doctor then hops on top of the woman and sucks the air out of her anesthetic bag. Cronenberg’s typically out-there flourishes drape the medical team in bright red outfits, an odd visual choice that gives the sequence a ritualistic occult vibe.

Inarguably a primary influence on Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, French director Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face isn’t just cinema’s most shocking mad doctor flick of all time—it’s also one of cinema’s most overlooked horror gems. In it, Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) lures innocent young women to his mansion in an effort to cut off the current victim’s face and fasten it onto that of his daughter, who suffered face-ruining burns in a car accident.

Without a new, scar-free face, the doc’s girl, Christiane (Edith Scob), wears an all-white, featureless mask that makes her look like a bloodless walking corpse, a lasting image that gives Eyes Without A Face a haunting quality that’s tough to shake. And one scene in particular, a grisly and methodical face-removal sequence uncommon for its time, is one of horror’s great try-not-to-look-away moments.