Trog, 1970

 

It's amazing what they put on The Criterion Channel, although it is a foreign film. It's very Englandy. They have a quaint English town. An elderly English butcher unwisely attacks Trog (short for troglodyte) with a meat cleaver and is hoisted on his own meat hook, then Trog overturns a Morris Minor Estate and it becomes engulfed in flames.

Trog himself made me think of Piltdown Man. In 1912, an amateur English paleontologist stuck the jawbone of an orangutan onto a modern human skull and claimed to have discovered the missing link. In Trog's case, he was just a regular person but with the head of an ape. The ape head was reportedly left over from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Joan Crawford as a renowned anthropologist who tries to mother Trog. She has him in a cage in her lab, but a local rich guy demands that he be killed because he might bring down property values. 

Crawford's last film. Might make a good double feature with Mildred Pierce. Both had Crawford trying to be motherly with unfortunate results.