The Choppers

Competently made jd film, with Arch Hall Jr. as the lead delinquent. Together, he and his teenage buddies mount a clever operation to strip abandoned cars along a deserted road. Their base is a rundown auto yard run by a cowboy clown and an escapee from a fat farm (VeSota). There, Moose and Cowboy run the operation and fence the goods, mainly for their own profit. Trouble is an insurance company has sent in an investigator to help out the cops who've hit a dead-end.

Still looking like the Pillsbury doughboy, actor Hall nevertheless delivers a pretty good performance, along with the rest of the cast that also includes former star Tom Brown as a cop. But it's really VeSota who steals the movie looking like a squatting toad. He's quite a commanding presence. Good thing whistle bait Gaba's along to furnish sexy eye relief from all the guys, especially VeSota. The action's filmed along barren LA-area roads making you wonder why anybody's there. Still, the meager budget is used wisely to deliver realistic results. Then too, Hall Sr. let a pro (Jason) direct, which may account for the uptick in quality from his other, often campy, productions.

All in all, the 70-minutes amounts to respectable drive-in fare that fans of the Halls can catch without embarrassment.

Not in the league of THE SADIST or WILD GUITAR, this early Arch Hall, Jr. flick is fun, b/w, and low. Love Moose, junkyard mogul (great caricature of him on the sign as well). Whatever these guys were thinking when they made this type of exploitation film is okay with me. The slang dialogue is flowing and plenty of cheeseburgers to go around.

A 4 out of 10. Best performance = the guy who plays Moose. This is on DVD with WILD GUITAR so check it out, daddy-o! Lame songs which are perfect, chicks just good-looking enough to seem like they'd be around these guys, and nice locale where they filmed it. Arch Hall, Sr. must have been a strange dude, bankrolling his kid's career this way, but what the hey!

For a movie that rhymes "Monkeys in my Hatband" with "I can do a handstand" for the lead character's big song, this movie was pretty good.

It's a movie with a moral that if parents don't look out for their kids they will start stealing car parts and shoot a bunch of cops. Does anybody know what he meant by "Monkeys in my hatband"?

I don't get it. Perhaps watching this movie on the roof of a supermarket in center city Philadelphia made it a bit more entertaining.

I hope that Arch Hall Jr. is one day recognized as the genius he is.

. . . which isn't saying much, as besides this and the excellent "The Sadist," Fairway's output was nothing but Grade-Z trash. There are several factors, however, that raise this a notch or two above the usual Fairway garbage. One is that director Leigh Jason makes this film look better and more professional than it deserves. Jason, a Hollywood veteran who had been directing since the 1930s, had obviously fallen on hard times if he was reduced to working for Fairway, but he still knew how to put a film together, something that Fairway never seemed to quite get the hang of. Another factor in the film's favor is leading lady Marianne Gaba. While she's no great shakes as an actress, she is nonetheless competent, and also drop-dead gorgeous (as one would expect a former Playboy Playmate to be) and a welcome relief from the embarrassing attempts at acting from most of the rest of the cast (one odd thing, though, is her "romance" with Tom Brown, who plays her boss. Brown, who had been an actor since the 1920s, has to be at least 25 years older than Gaba, and that kind of age difference was seldom, if ever, seen in Hollywood films until relatively recently). Veteran heavy Bruno VeSota is his usual enjoyable if somewhat hammy self as the crooked owner of a junkyard. Whatever pluses the film has, however, are more than outweighed by the laughable, self-consciously "hip" dialog by writer/producer Arch Hall Sr.--some of the "slang" he writes for the teenagers is out of the 1940s, not the 1960s--and the almost non-existent production values. Most of the film is shot outdoors and the few interior sets are threadbare in the extreme. The "rock n' roll" score is, as has been previously mentioned, perversely enjoyable in its awfulness. A few neat old cars--especially an absolutely gorgeous '59 Cadillac convertible that is seen in the very beginning of the film and never shown again and a very nice early '50s Kaiser that is, unfortunately, stripped to the bones and trashed--and the beautiful Gaba make this a film that you might want to see once, but that's about it.

A delicious little JD film about kids who strip cars for parts. Yes, our youth has gone wild! But what's up with that song Arch Hall Jr. sings? "Monkeys in my hat band. I can do a hand stand" Poetic genius.

Would you believe that a life of stealing parts off cars can lead to a violent death? Lives are thrown by the way side in a climatic shoot out in the junk yard. And who's to blame? The parents.