Eegah

Watching this movie is an experience akin to being run over by a dairy truck...it leaves you dazed and confused, with an overwhelming memory of cheese.

'Eegah!" is one of those enjoyably wretched films of a long gone era, made in a time when anyone thought they could make a film, and indeed, anyone could. (See "Manos" or "Teenage Strangler" for further examples.). The script is so disconnected and incoherent, the actors so unconvincing and affected, the whole vibe so amateurish and transparent in its effort to be cool and hip and with it, while having no clue as to what 'hip' really is....that you almost want to affectionately pat the cast and crew on their little heads and comfort them. "There, there, Arch Hall Sr., you did your best, that's all that matters," you want to say.

That is, when you don't want everyone associated with the film dead.

Arch Hall Jr. has been the target of numerous remarks comparing his face and appearance unfavorably to everything up to "a pile of napalmed squirrels heaped around a parking meter" (Rick Johnson from Creem magazine). In his defense, I am sure that he probably didn't look all that bad in person. But there is that unfortunate blond Pompadour and an unfortunate snub nose and too much skin bronzer, and the results on camera are indescribably uncompelling. So the camera hates him, and the poor kid is completely out of his depth; he can't act, he can't sing, and he can't do action, and the director keeps forcing him to do all those things front and center for the entire movie. You can only wonder if the kid actually thought his performance in EEGAH was going to make him the new Fabian, or if he knew that he would be lucky not to get lynched by the public when the film was released.

There are three songs 'performed' (along with an swinging band instrumental piece) by AH Jr in this film, and they are all guaranteed classics of unintended low comedy. The most side splitting is the one where Arch and his amps are poolside, and he starts lip-syncing to a song about about 'Vicki'.A coloratura soprano voice kicks in behind him a measure later, doing solfeggio on the melody line a full two octaves above his thin little voice and completely overpowering it. It's the goofiest, most overblown, inappropriate thing possible to do to this simple little ballad, but they tear right into it with gusto. What was the arranger smoking when he came up with this? (Or what did he start smoking in order to get through having to arrange it in the first place???)

The plot is also endearingly pathetic in its attempt to work in a 'Beauty and The Beast' motif between the female lead and Eegah himself...Roxy is apparently supposed to be torn between her fear of Eegah and her sympathy for him as an innocent. Or else she's supposed to be torn between Eegah and Arch Hall Jr. However...I have no idea what the young lady playing the girl was like in real life, but there has rarely been a poorer choice to play an ingénue. She does faint on cue real good, though.

Any time a film chooses to end with a quote from the Bible, you can bet that the filmmakers knew they were in trouble and wanted to invoke a 'class act' so they could gain validity from association. Given how creepy and self important Arch Hall Sr's performance was during the film, his quote from the Old Testament about "There were Giants In the Earth' , which was meant to serve as Eegah's eulogy comes completely out of nowhere, and leaves you going..."What? Huh?" And the final embrace between Archy and Roxy, where he dubs in the line "Remember...I love you" and no ones' lips move is fully as bad as "Watch Out For Snakes"...but because it comes after the movie has bludgeoned the viewer fully into a coma, I don't think people remember it as often.

Watch EEGAH! at least once. You'll have a great time heaping scorn on it.

Eegah is all it has been hyped up to be. It is an awful film with some of the most ludicrous scenes, dialog, and performances to be seen in film. And by the way - it's a whole lot of fun to sit through. A caveman, having lived out his life in Southern California in a cave with a family that is now mummified, stops the car of a beautiful teen one night. She tells her famous author dad, and he goes into the mountain to find the prehistoric man. Soon she and her idiot boyfriend go to find pops and the adventure begins. Eeagh is a terrible film on many levels. The script for starters is just plain stupid. How did a cave man live in the cave of a mountain covered with nothing but sand and brush for over a century? Where did he get his food and water? Yeah, sure we saw him with a rabbit but let's get real. The cave man acts like a child for much of the film even allowing himself to be shaved by Roxy, the girl of his dreams(after a century or so any woman could have fit that bill). The Neanderthal is played by none other than Richard Kiel, Jaws from James Bond fame. Kiel is actually the best thing about this film. He gives a performance with some depth. His colleagues; however, are sufficiently deficient in that department as to make a complete mockery of the film's plot. Roxy is bad. Her dad, Arch Hall Sr. (the director as well) is wooden, and the worst acting prize goes to the director's son Arch Hall Jr. as a real annoying boyfriend who has to sing some songs every now and then. Here is a sample of the lyrics: "I wish I had a billion dollars and a banker's salary and I would buy up all the flowers to give to Valerie." That's one of the better lines. Hall Jr. mugs, struts, and ambles through much of the film delivering inane dialog. The end of the film has the obvious denouement to a relationship that just "caved in." Even though it is bad, this film is a whole lot of fun. The errors jump out at you from the first scene and the laughs ensue almost immediately from the unintentional ineptitude of the makers of the film.

The great thing about "Eegah!" is that it's memorably awful. Even for a bad film, there's something so unique in the dopiness of this strange tale about a caveman loose in the arid wastes of Palm Springs that it really lifts "Eegah!" up to the level of Ed Wood, Gamera, and the film version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band." Once you've seen it, you'll never forget it. There are many good films you can't say that about.

Richard Kiel, who went on to play a terrific villain in the best James Bond film of the 1970s, "The Spy Who Loved Me," stars as the misunderstood Neanderthal who falls in love with the daughter of famed adventure writer "Robert I. Miller." Like many great men, Dr. Miller is a maze of contradictions, wearing a pith helmet and khaki bush jacket along with black socks and carrying a tiny man-purse. He also installed two mini-ovens in his den, handy for TV snacking.

While trying to take a scintillating photo of a dead campfire, Dr. Miller is surprised by the lumbering giant, who takes him to a cave made of obvious canvas and filled with badly-carved mannequins supposed to be his long-dead kin. It's left up to Dr. Miller's daughter Roxy and her boyfriend, musician and dune-buggy enthusiast Tommy Nelson, to save him. But the horny caveman has other plans for racy Roxy.

Tommy is played by Arch Hall Jr., the other actor in "Eegah!" people remember. Unlike Kiel, it's Hall's performance in this movie that made him famous. He's not exactly repulsive by real-world standards, but his face really sticks out on a movie screen, like Michael J. Pollard crossed with Alfred E. Newman. To make matters worse, he wears his hair in a ridiculously exaggerated greasy blond pompadour and is presented in the film as something of a teen idol, fawned over by the ladies and prone to engaging banter like: "Wowsy wow wow!" It's hard to believe that director Nicholas Merriwether thought this bug-eyed scrub could carry a tuning fork let alone a tune, until you discover Merriwether was the alias of one Arch Hall Sr. (who also played Dr. Miller.)

Giving away more is a disservice. You really have to see the film for yourself. There are many bad films out there, but only one "Eegah!" Even the folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 couldn't improve on this one, though they tried. Sure, they picked up on one absurd line, "Watch out for snakes," and it's now a catch phrase for those of us who have been "Eegah!-ed." But focusing on just that one line is so wrong, like just thinking "Rosebud" when someone mentions "Citizen Kane." There's so much else going on here, and for once Joel and his 'bots seemed at a loss.

You can't get angry at a film that fails on so many levels. It's like a reverse tutorial in cinematic competency. It's just good these guys found work making movies rather than in nuclear fission.

Really bad music, bad acting, bad dialogue, but all bad in an enjoyable way, like the phony fight scenes by the pool and the way Roxy pretends to cut Kiel's fake beard while her father murmurs creepy encouragement from the sidelines. Bad films are fun to read about, but they are rarely fun to watch the way "Eegah!" is.

This movie is an anthropological curiosity about an anthropological curiosity. Dug up from a time when it would seem like a good idea to produce a caveman/horror/comedy/musical, "Eegah" today leaves viewers astounded by the shear freakish nature of the film itself. Richard Kiel stars as Eegah the caveman whom for millinea had survived in a cave with his mummified relatives in the hills near a desert town. For some reason he didn't choose to emerge from the desolate perimeters of his home until 1962. The hapless female played by Marilyn Manning almost runs him down one night while driving home. After she screeches to a halt she faints at the sight of the collosal Eegah donning furs and swinging a plastic club. When she awakes she tells her boyfriend played by the esteemed Arch Hall Jr., all about the "giant" she saw. Eventually Eegah kidnapps Marilyn's Dad (played by Arch Hall Sr). Arch and Marilyn go into the hills in a dune buggy to find him. After the ensuing incidents they all escape an angry Eegah who then follows them on foot back to town where the real fun begins. Arch Hall Jr. is the ham of all hams in this one, singing badly these love songs devoted to different girls his character had supposedly been involved with. His voice is that of a fifteen year old kid who hasn't completely developed the manly timbre and squeaks out emotive ballads like the low-point of any high school talent show. The goof-meter on this film is to overload as scene after scene actors act badly, Richard Kiel tweeks his face in reaction to whatever is taking place while an out of sync voice over grunts "RRRRRRR....SHTEMLO...EEGAH...." The lighting in the interior scenes look like a home movie from days of yore and the props are straight out of an arts and crafts store. Overall, I can't say "Eegah" is one of the worst films ever made as it's never really painful and too much fun to watch. The films that vie for that title cause the viewer excrutiating agony and are made by those who have no apparent intent on entertaining anyone(i.e. "Robot Monster", "Flesh Feast", "House of 1000 Corpses"). I recommend "Eegah" as a cult classic and a fun party movie.

I agree with Dave Sagehorn's review in Bad Movie Nights. See it by clicking the Reviews button. I saw this at a U.S. Naval Station theatre when it came out in 1962 for an admission charge of ten cents. It was overpriced. It was so bad that the sailors enjoyed booing, hissing, cheering, and throwing empty popcorn boxes at the screen at appropriate moments (you don 't get to share such moments with home video).

Years later, on the radio I heard a review of a book called "The 100 Worst Movies of All Time". The movie that the author rated as the No. 1 Worst Movie of all time was Eegah! On the IMDb ratings search, only 23 other movies have ratings that equal or fall below the 2.1 user rating achived by Eegah! So this is not just a bad movie. It is so flamboyantly bad that it has earned a permanent niche in the history of the cinema. I recommend it only if you and a group of friends are in the mood to hiss, boo, and throw popcorn boxes.