The Year of the Yahoo!

I usually am a great fan of political movies. They can be hysterically funny like The Dark Horse or truly serious like State Of The Union. A really good one came out a few years after The Year Of The Yahoo when Robert Redford did The Candidate. I can think of a whole lot of others as well.

But The Year Of The Yahoo will never be one of them. It's as bad as bad can get. I'm not saying it had potential which sadly it did. But it should have been in the hands of a competent director and cast.

Whoever told country singer Claude King he could act should have gotten the neophyte thespian a good director as well. But King was saddled with an equally untalented and misdirected cast. King plays a country singer more along the lines of Merle Haggard who some sharp politicos including a corrupt governor decide would make a fine US Senator.

That's not as far fetched as you think and after the last election it showed anyone can get elected anything in the right year. Pappy O'Daniel in Texas, Jimmy Davis in Louisiana, and Glen H. Taylor of Idaho all had country entertainer backgrounds and all got elected governor and/or senator from their states. A biographical film of any one of them would be a good project.

But this one, a satirical film that just isn't funny and has no real wit to it.

It's been a lot of years, but I was an extra in this movie as Sharron Morton. This was filmed in San Antonio Texas. I've often wondered over the years about the movie. I've never seen the finished product! I've told my friends and family about the movie but have never been able to prove until now that it actually exist! At the time the movie was filmed my three children were toddlers, they wouldn't remember. I've lost contact with the one other person I knew in the movie. Colonel Andy Jackson was a major disc jockey for KBUC radio in San Antonio. I started looking for the info on the internet this afternoon and ended up having to call San Antonio to get your info. However, the site is great and I've found my movie! Thanks,

Sharron Perdue

This was Herschell Gordon Lewis' penultimate effort before getting out of the film-making racket and getting into mail order, and it was made either right before or possibly even during THE GORE GORE GIRLS. Allen Kahn's script is a serious political satire about a country and western singer, played by Claude King (he of "Wolverton Mountain") who runs for State Senator. King also runs into conflict with his political handlers, who are headed by an exceptionally slimy Roger Ailes-like character played by Ray Sager. Although it still looks like it was shot in two or three days, Lewis puts more into this film in terms of shots and cuts than in any other work I've seen from him. There is some padding, but at least most of it relates to the plot - there are no long tracking shots following the guy getting out of the car and up the walk to the front door. There is one softcore sex scene, and it's positively revolting. If you like seeing simulated sex between two actors who obviously don't give a damn about one another, this is for you; I took advantage of it to answer the call of nature.

The acting is above average for a Herschell Gordon Lewis film, and overall I felt YEAR OF THE YAHOO! was very well done. Back in 1972 the public was barely aware that politicians used handlers to help shape their public image, and that's essentially what the film is about. Of course, today those same handlers are not only "out of the closet", but successful ones enjoy a celebrity status that is nearly equal to the candidates they handle. In 1972 the political handler was a relatively new phenomenon, at least one that worked like a hired hand who was likewise uninterested in the ideology of the candidate or campaign. Lewis' film is a valuable political document of that trend in a much more innocent time than ours.

That's not to say that YEAR OF THE YAHOO! is perfect. Kahn's script is kind of flat at times and is also so vaguely stated here and there that it is incomprehensible. It is like Kahn didn't know the political lingo that he needed, so he made up his own, which only he could truly make sense out of. It made me long for the crackling wit of the writing of Lewis' usual screenwriter Alison Louise Downe, whose work contributes so much to making GRUESOME TWOSOME such a "pointed" (sorry, I couldn't resist) satire. The situation isn't helped by the fact that in the one surviving print of the YEAR OF THE YAHOO! that the soundtrack is badly damaged during the first reel, making a dialogue scene that was hard to follow in the first place doubly tough to comprehend. Claude King's vocals when he is singing are miked poorly, so at times I can't follow him either, even though the setting is in a television studio where the sound should be spot on perfect.

These aren't minor quibbles, and this is not Lewis' best film. But it is about as close as he came to making a "straight" film, and I think he did his best by the project on his limited means. This is a movie that if you took the totally unnecessary sex scene out you could show it to a film class or use it in the context of formal festival type screening. That is certainly not something that I can say about most other Herschell Gordon Lewis films!

There are good HG Lewis films such as 'Blood Feast' and 'The Wizard of Gore' where the bad production value, cinematography, special effects, and acting (aside from Ray Sager, whose charisma brings substance to all of his roles) surmounted in a hilarious and enjoyable film. 'Year of the Yahoo!' is the worst kind of HG Lewis film in that it is extremely tedious, badly shot, (not ha-ha badly shot like 'Blood Feast', but just plain bad) and in the end not worth investing your time in. Much like 'Just for the Hell of It', every scene is dragged out so that the film can reach feature length and so we're left with scenes begging to be cut in half.

But like even the most mediocre HG Lewis film, there are the moments that elevate the content above 'poor', such as every scene with Ray Sager. He bites into the role of a sleazy television producer but does it with zeal and personality. But even for Ray Sager, you'd be better off checking out the entertaining 'Blast-Off Girls' or the wonderful 'Wizard of Gore', where his over-the-top yet likable acting style is in full throttle, resulting in one of the most interesting cinematic characters of all time.