Head (1968)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson
Stars: Peter Tork, David Jones, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith

Index: The First Thirty.

Going into this movie, I noted that it’s been a couple of decades since I last saw Head and I don’t remember much about it, just that it was a Monkees film with Frank Zappa and a mule.

Then I realised that I’d written a review of it in 2007, in which I mentioned that “It’s been a couple of decades since I saw Head and I don't remember much about it, except that beyond the Monkees, there was Frank Zappa and a mule and not a lot of sense.”

So, nothing’s changed. Including that it was a bull not a mule. I clarified that at the end of my previous review and it’s even on the poster if you look closely enough, but I forgot again anyway. The one thing I remember about this film isn’t in this film, which may actually be oddly appropriate. To borrow actual dialogue, I “can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s vividly imagined experience”?

I can’t remember why I watched it in 2007, but I’m watching it in 2025 for Jack Nicholson, who makes a brief appearance—even briefer, if you can believe it, than his brief appearance in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—but who wrote the film with director Bob Rafelson, under the heavy influence of narcotics. Which explains a great deal why it makes very little sense.

If there’s a point, it’s the exact opposite of a cash-in. The Monkees point out that they’re a manufactured product and then explore what that means in surreal fashion. Many audience members felt like the band were calling them suckers, but somehow they felt that before the film came out, which explains why it bombed horribly at the box office. While it cost three quarters of a million dollars to make, it took a whopping sixteen thousand. As in five digits.

It’s been suggested that Monkees fans didn’t want to see it because it was a change of style and the people who may have enjoyed it didn’t want to see it because it was a Monkees movie.

Those who actually bought tickets got the anarchy of The Monkees TV show but weirder, each wild scene replaced by another without much attempt to link them. The goal seems to be to put the band members, both separately and together, into as many genres as possible and hope they survive to the end. Spoiler: yes, they do, but absolutely no further. This movie killed the Monkees. In trying to evolve, they lost everybody.

It’s all too much, perhaps deliberately so. As the Newsday quote on the poster suggests, it’s every genre all at once. It’s a war movie. It’s a David Lean epic. It’s a musical. It’s a western. It’s a horror movie. It’s a Bette Davis dramedy, with famous female impersonator T. C. Jones doing a pretty good Davis. It’s a Bond flick. It’s a black and white sped up slapstick comedy with a moustachioed villain. It’s an art film, of course. It’s stoner philosophy.

There is value to be found and I enjoyed the film far more this time around than I expected to. However, the value is in mere moments.

It’s pretty cool, for instance, to find these pop culture icons playing dandruff on Victor Mature’s head in a commercial for a vacuum cleaner. Davy Jones was five foot three, so it’s objectively funny to put him in the ring with Sonny Liston, however that ends up.

There are also cool moments that I’d call innovative and ahead of their time. The scene in the bookends, in which the Monkees crash through a dull bridge opening ceremony, with the entire cast of the film in hot pursuit, ends up rather reminiscent of the meta chase at the end of Blazing Saddles but six years earlier. The film burns up in the projector at the end of the credits, just like the revolutionary ending to Two-Lane Blacktop, but three years earlier. Oh, and that film was directed by Monte Hellman, who edited this film. Borrowed much?

There are two fundamental problems here to counter all that.

One is that more scenes miss than hit and I would bet that Nicholson and Rafelson agreed once the drugs wore off. What was the point of the dance number with Davy Jones and Toni Basil? Was the only reason to have Annette Funicello in the film the ability to honestly say that Annette Funicello was in the film? After all, the very title was a pun they couldn’t use until the next film, which would quote: “From the studio that gave you Head.”

The other is that these cool moments don’t add up to anything of substance, so it becomes a cross between surreal sketch comedy, self-destructive art film and crass commercial. At one point, it all pauses to literally channel surf through Bela Lugosi movies, news footage and actual adverts. Did you know that the world’s largest Ford dealership is in Encino?

No wonder I kept the Frank Zappa scene in my head over every other aspect of the film. “The youth of America is depending on you to show them the way,” he tells them. Perhaps we all remembered one cameo that happened to tickle us. There are many of them, a good chunk of whom I hadn’t heard of. Who is the American football player in a World War I trench? He had to be somebody so I looked him up. It’s apparently Ray Nitschke. Who is Ray Nitschke? An American football player.

At this point, I feel like I’ve utterly failed to maintain any sense of flow in this review, but then that just reflects the movie itself. Maybe I should just hop, skip and jump my way to the end just like the Monkees do, after noting that the Jack Nicholson scene has him walk into a studio commissary to argue with a few people and then wander back out again. That’s it.

So, imagine me sinking to the bottom of the bay with Micky Dolenz in psychedelic colours—the technique used is called solarization and it was brand new. You don’t want to imagine me performing a song live on stage to adoring fans, so imagine the intercut news footage of Vietnamese dead instead. There are important things happening way over there, so why are you here listening to me?

And, if you’re pissed off at how blatantly I throw in commercials—have you bought your copy of WTF!? Films You Won’t Believe Exist yet? It’s on sale at Amazon—then imagine me with Dolenz dying of thirst in a blazing desert until we stumble onto an empty Coke machine. And after we tell the voiceover artist to quit and he does, we can borrow a nearby tank and blow the damn thing up.

Most importantly, imagine me with Dolenz and Mike Nesmith getting fed up of being in a western, getting shot with fake arrows, so we just walk off set. Through the backdrop. Here I go. Watch me.