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117 reviews in total

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35 out of 40 people found the following review useful:
Brilliantly Bad, 15 December 2004

Author: Bill Slocum (bill.slocum@gmail.com) from Norwalk, CT United States

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.

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21 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
Goof Meter Overload, 23 October 2003
Author: lost1-1 (lost1@earthlink.net) from Las Vegas

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.

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21 out of 26 people found the following review useful:
Homer's Odyssey Meets Shakespeare, 9 December 2009

Author: bobloblaw2002 from United States

This is the second-greatest story every told. A lesson for posterity. A tale of star-crossed lovers, tortured souls, intrigue, adventure, passion, lies, anger, denial, betrayal, and finally, redemption. The master story-teller, Arch Hall Sr., regales us with an epic feature that only DeMille or Scorsese could ever truly appreciate in its sheer brilliance, the insane could only ever lament in its simplicity, and the plebeian masses could only ever envy in its complexity.

To experience Eegah is to experience being alive through:

Tommy, our intrepid hero. Although Tommy is the hero here, his dark side is evident when he gratuitously calls Eegah, the giant, "High Pockets." Does a caveman giant not also have feelings? Is this sort of callous disregard for human life really necessary? This style of writing and directing would be copied years later by Peckinpah and Tarantino. Nevertheless, Tommy redeems himself by taking Roxy into the desert to go whizing. These days, that would get you a citation and a restraining order. But in those days, that's how it was done. A guitar, a dune buggy, some bad lyrics and a tube a Brylcreem were the only tools necessary to overcome inequities of mythological proportions. Even brave Ulysses couldn't overcome these odds.

Roxy, a misunderstood teenager. You'd think that you'd have a grip on your adolescent foolishness by your mid thirties. You'd think that if your father tried to whore you off to the first lecherous bearded caveman giant that came along, you'd have a clue that something was wrong in your life. Not Roxy. She's just bought a new swim suit and you oughta see her swim. Blame it on the sulfur water. Notably, ever the avant-garde Director, Arch Hall Sr. makes use of the wild and carefree sexual revolution of the sixties as explored through the subtle nuance of Roxy's Electra complex. This is most evident when Roxy shaves her father's face in Eegah's cave. Disturbing? Perhaps.

Robert I. Miller, writer of all those adventure books, and Roxy's father. He lives up at the club, and has an oven in his living room. He mixes metaphors really badly. He quotes Bible verses that don't exist. Sometimes, he falls on his camera bag. And sometimes, just sometimes, he needs a little extra dose of those "aspirins" in his gear bag. When you were young, your mom told you not to sit so close to the TV. Now you understand why.

Then there's Krueger, the helicopter pilot who is tormented by a life of blown gaskets and acid-induced flashbacks. The headaches never really went away, and the doctors told him that he needed to stop flying people into the desert in his helicopter. How many people had he flown in, now? Was it 40? Was it 50? He couldn't remember. They were still there, where he had left them, in the desert. That wasn't important now. The doctors were trying to take his wings away. But Krueger would show them! He'd find that secret VC ammo dump and really let'em have it! If only the headaches would stop. Really, nothing the VA hospital and a hundred bucks couldn't fix.

And finally, Eegah, the caveman giant. His life was a metaphor for the conflict that exists between our inner-most desires and our need to exist as a civilized society. His downfall was the result of the primitive desires of a caveman that just didn't understand, and a tag-team Tequila themed pool party gone awry. Predictably, these monumental forces converge to create a pool party version of the perfect storm. As we see, the pool party devolves into a drunken debauchery, the likes of which would shock even Nero or Caligula. Should blame be cast upon the Desert Patrol for its lack of pool party etiquette or untrained response to a 311G in progress (large man or giant creating a disturbance)? Should blame be cast upon Roxy for her wild hypnotic dancing and seductive siren-like advances towards one of the band's guitar players? Or perhaps blame should be cast upon Tommy for getting in way over his head in a tag-team rendition of Tequila requiring no less than six musicians, when clearly, the song can only be played safely by no more than three. The message to our society is quite clear: Without the rigid rules of civilization, you too may experience the crazed love of a prehistoric giant. Alas, for Eegah, there are no good answers. God gives pistachios to those that have no teeth, and so it was unto poor Eegah. Yes, I too cried at the end.

I know. "But what of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? Gone with the Wind? Surely these works must come into play before naming a movie the second-greatest story ever told" you may ask. Did Citizen Kane have a bearded caveman giant? Did Casablanca have an oven in the living room? Was there any whizing in Gone with the Wind? I think not. To grasp the significance and depth of a masterpiece such as Eegah, one need only ponder the phrase: "You oughta see. Her. Swim."

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13 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
"Wowzie! Wow! Wow!", 5 November 2005

Author: BaronBl00d (baronbl00d@aol.com) from NC

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.

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15 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
Egad, 2 May 2004
Author: Gafke from United States

This. Movie. Hurts. A LOT!

In the early 1960s, bug-eyed space cadet Roxy drives out into the desert and directly into the path of a club-wielding giant with a fake beard glued to his face. It's EEGAH, a poor caveman who has somehow survived the Neanderthal age and is living just outside of L.A. in a cardboard cave. No one believes Roxy's tale, except for her incredibly greasy dad and her icky boyfriend. Dad decides to hike out into the desert to see if he can discover the truth behind Eegah, but when he is late coming home, Roxy and icky boyfriend Tom drive out in their wacky dunebuggy to search for him. Soon, Roxy and her dad are held prisoner in Eegah's garbage bag-draped cave and Tom must find them before Roxy falls victim to a caveman's lust!

Gag. This is pretty bottom-of-the-barrel godawful stuff. It's silly, goofy, stupid and cheap, and at it's worst it makes for some pretty uncomfortable viewing. See Roxy shave daddy and Eegah! See Roxy try to pry herself out of Eegah's slimy embrace whilst sweaty dad looks on and does nothing! Ugh, it's pretty gross. Even the MST3K version is hard to sit through, even though Joel and the Bots do their best to make the nauseating sequences more bearable. There's some decent music in here for fans of 1960s beach-twisty crud, and fans of schlock will be delighted to see a cameo appearance by Ray Dennis Steckler and then- wife Carolyn Brandt as the Couple By The Pool. But other than that, this film has little to offer in the way of entertainment and may only be appreciated by true hardcore fans of bad movies.

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15 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
Rated Worst in "The 100 Worst Movies of All Time", 6 September 1998
Author: Gary North from California

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.

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17 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Hey, check it out, there's an oven in the living room!, 8 December 2004

Author: harricklomax from United States

This would have been an okay sixties monster movie with a decent monster performance by Kiel, who manages to almost pull of scary and nearly pull off sad. However there was one fatal flaw in the making of this film. That flaw was Arch Hall Sr., who co wrote, directed, acted in, and I think produced the movie. I don't know what he was thinking when he put this thing together, but it was demented. First off, the movie is just stupid. The dialogue is horrible, there are big parts that make no sense, very little happens, and the characters are all annoying and retarded. Furthermore, there are lots of really weird voice over problems, like when the three main people walk past the screen and a voice from the sky shouts at extra high volume while no one is speaking, "Watch out for snakes!". Then there's the fact that Arch Hall Sr. cast himself as the father of the girl who gets kidnapped. Maybe she was really his girlfriend in real life or maybe Arch Hall Sr. is just weird, but whatever it was, the two act really bizarre together. First of all, they do a lot of strange, "semi-sexual but in a weird and kind of gross way" things. Also, Arch, as the father, keeps pimping his daughter out to Eegah.

But the WORST thing about this movie is Arch Hall Sr.'s most painful contribution to the film. Arch Hall Jr. All I can say is that Arch Hall Jr. is probably one of the worst actor's I've ever seen, and probably one of the most horrendously ugly people who's ever lived. His face is so creepy it made me shiver ever time he smiled. Of course he was the hero.

The good thing about Eegah? Made a great episode for Mystery Science Theater 3000. The show that makes bad movies good. Watch for the living room with an oven on the wall. Check this one out. But not without MST3K to protect you. It wouldn't be worth the pain.

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9 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Arch Jr and his magic guitar, 10 April 2006

Author: manicgecko from United States

Ah, a serene night, your girl camped out on a bed roll on your tricked out dune buggy, a horny prehistoric giant (talked about in Genesis none-the-less) on the prowl for your girl, and not a care in the world. You pull out your guitar and sing an ode to Veronica, and that guitar plays bass, percussion, and even whistles. Strange I never actually heard guitar in any of his songs.

This is just a sample of the so-bad-it's good campiness available in Eegah. But unfortunately there is just as much so-bad-it-reeks that I can't give it more than 3 stars. I actually thought it was over when the unfortunate trio escaped from the cave. Man was I mistaken, there was another excruciating stretch of film with Eegah in the modern world. And don't get me started on Arch Jr., he can thank whatever god that smiles down on him that Sr. is in charge. How else would this hack get to be the "Elvis" of this movie. "I swear on my stack of Elvis Presley LP's" there are few worse performances in cinematic history.

So in review - this movie is not as bad as the bottom 100 ranking leads you to believe, but nowhere near masterpiece theater. Is entertaining though with a bunch of smart-mouthed friends and lots of beer.

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13 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
Caused me unspeakable amounts of pain., 11 January 2004
Author: nick-621 from Ottawa

Thanks to this movie, I had Arch Hall Jr's terrible singing voice singing about Vicky for a week. It almost drove me mad. If your one who easily gets songs stuck in ones head, this is a movie you would do well to avoid.

Other than that, it had some real camp value.. Not enough Go-Go Dancing though.

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5 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
"Did I mention my tires are filled with water?? ....My tires are filled with water!!", 30 April 2005

Author: lemon_magic from Wavy Wheat, Nebraska

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.

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