Anytime somebody tries to predict how pop music history will logically pan out, just remember that a studio band cobbled together to score a terrible 1972 sci-fi-horror race comedy wound up making a record that became a building block of entire new genres. But the Bronx DJs who turned “Apache” into one of the fundamental components of hip-hop’s instrumental drum-break revolution and the UK hardcore jungle producers who weaponized its percussive oomph into hyperelaborate beat fusillades didn’t need to watch The Thing With Two Heads to catch on to greatness. They just found a gem in the cut-out bins and extrapolated its slightly kitschy yet deeply dance-commanding funk into an inescapable part of the musical language. Producer Michael Viner hauled a bunch of crack studio players up to Vancouver to take advantage of CanCon airplay quotas, made what was essentially a Ventures album for the funxploitation set, and wound up in every self-respecting DJ’s crates since those studio players included percussion deity King Errison on the aforementioned incredible bongos and omnipresent everydrummer Jim Gordon bolstering the beat. And since the gimmick demanded that the beat sounded huge, well, here we are: hundreds of samples later, and the source material still clobbers you into motion. The uptempo jams — the flared-baggies funk-surf of “Let There Be Drums,” the make-the-hippies-uprock take on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” the title cut’s burbling-fondue gloopiness — are as danceable as they are unserious, but it also didn’t take a lot of tweaking by Massive Attack (“Angel”) or the Beastie Boys (“Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”) to find the sinister scuzz beneath the slow swagger and big-band brass of “Last Bongo in Belgium.”

– Nate Patrin