Two Heads are Better Than None (2000)

Director: Michael Grossman
Writer: Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert
Stars: Kenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell, Ken Foree, Teal Marchande and Vanessa Baden

Index: Make It a Double.

While Two Heads are Better Than None follows a vaguely horror theme, it’s about as different from Leatherface as it could be. Kenan & Kel was a Nickelodeon sitcom, spun off from a sketch show called All That, and this TV movie ended its final season, with the exception of a single clip show released five months later.

Kenan Rockwell and Kel Kimble are a pair of best friends living in Chicago but I believe (as I haven’t otherwise seen the show), Kenan & Kel revolves around Kenan’s family with Kel as the wildcard in the shenanigans that ensue.

Kenan is the straight man, played by Kenan Thompson, now the longest ever serving cast member on Saturday Night Live. Kel is his lively foil, played by rapper Kel Mitchell. Ken Foree was a cast regular, as Roger Rockwell, Kenan’s long suffering dad. His wife Sheryl is played by Teal Marchande and their daughter Kyra by a prolific television actress, Vanessa Baden.

Based on this TV movie alone, it’s clear that Foree had a blast on the show and there are a host of moments here where it looks like Kel is trying to make him crack up and succeeding. I liked Kel a lot because of that, fortunately so because he’s an annoying character otherwise.

Roger also kicks this film into motion when he decides to take his family on a road trip. It’s just the Rockwells, with Kel quite deliberately not invited, but Kenan stuffs him into the boot anyway to be revealed when it’s too late to get him back home again.

Foree overplays Roger but then everyone in the show overplays everybody, the white folk in particular. While camping at night, they’re shocked by the sudden arrival of a relentlessly nice and bubbly white couple looking for some ketchup. Grey poupon just wouldn’t have fit.

They’re the Wilsons, soon called the Shellys because they’re Sheldon and Shelly, and their appearances punctuate the film. They show up inevitably, whatever’s happening, and remain nice and somewhat bubbly, even when they’re confined in a dungeon in a scary mansion on a hill waiting to be decapitated.

Just as I wouldn’t want to be on a road trip with the annoying Kel, I wouldn’t want it to be full of encounters with the Shellys. Given that they’re a white stereotype in a black show—and I have indeed met people like them—I find it interesting that they apparently know kung fu, even if we only see it sped up like they’re in a Keystone Kops short.

The decapitation angle is the logical end to the core plot strand. The movie jumps around episodically as the Rockwells travel, jokes built around campfire ghost stories, car trouble and a Ripley’s style roadside attraction, Believe It or Else. At one point, it turns into a musical, the whole place joining in with Superstition, to the accompaniment of Chimperace, the piano playing monkey. That is a great scene!

However, the core plot strand concerns the legend of the Headless Knight. Kenan met him in the woods while they’re camping, but there he is as an attraction at Believe It or Else, with an information pamphlet. What follows would be time honoured cliché in a horror movie but is ripe for parody here in a sitcom: a weird old dude warning them not to go to Rockville, the traditional domain of the Headless Knight; the car trouble right by the sign to, you guessed it, Rockville; and the house of horrors on the hill, complete with Michael Berryman as a butler.

And, as stupid and overplayed as it all is, it’s also quite a lot of fun. A decade after being the tough survivalist in Leatherface, Foree has fun playing an inept father who couldn’t do any of the things that Benny did in that film. In fact, he can’t even fix his own car, though his teen daughter can and does, with a barrette.

Were these Ken Foree characters, Roger and Benny, to exchange films, the results would be hilarious. I wonder how much Foree chose this because it played so much against his capable horror movie image. Never mind Leatherface, just look at him in Dawn of the Dead, Halloween and even From Beyond.

Berryman, the cast’s other horror legend, is clearly having just as much fun, again trying not to crack up as he stalks Kenan & Kel in the mansion at night, only to be hit in the face by a glass door. He doesn’t speak at all, so ends up defined by his unusual physical appearance, a situation he’s used to in horror movies. That’s echoed by the maid, Bethel, apparently having no eyelids, even though it looks like she does.

Given the white stereotype of the Shellys, I was fascinated to see how a black show would tackle horror stereotypes, especially with two horror legends in the cast. After all, black folk, Benny very much excepted, don’t traditionally do well in horror movies and usually die first. How would a black show handle this?

Well, many of the clichés are decades old, hearking back to the old dark houses of the thirties and sixties, with their secret passages and dungeons (and storms). The more topical gags are done through characters. However, a third family is there at the Headless Knight’s mansion, along with the Shellys and Kenan & Kel and they’re rather unusual.

They’re Harold and Nancy Takamoto, which makes it surprising to find that they’re black, and their Uncle Leo is a guesting Milton Berle, who’s white and just as uncaringly rude as Kel, presumably only because he’s old and doesn’t care any more. They’re all decapitated so that the Headless Knight can have more heads to choose from, but, as he initially appears with a white head, they clearly aren’t the first to go.

In other words, this embraces every horror stereotype it can find except the only one that traditionally applies to black characters. That shouldn’t be surprising.

I enjoyed this more the longer it ran. It took me a little while, coming in at the end of the fourth season, to adjust to an overdone sitcom style like Kenan & Kel. For a while, my reaction was to wonder how audiences had sat through four seasons of Kel. Kenan, sure, but Kel? That would seem to take a special masochism.

However, the longer it ran, the more I got it and the more individual moments shone out: Kenan running into a tree in abject fear, the Chimperace experience and Roger being hit by lightning twice. I liked how far they took the World’s Biggest Ball of String gag, into Raiders of the Lost Ark, maybe even Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! territory. And the way Arthur’s head becomes a new hood ornament is priceless.

This film showed me a entirely new side of Ken Foree. He must have loved this show and, if it had to end, this is a fun way to do it.