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Blu-ray Review: EEGAH (1962)

November 25, 2019

Written by DanXIII

Daniel XIII; the result of an arcane ritual involving a King Diamond album, a box of Count Chocula, and a copy of Swank magazine, is a screenwriter, director, producer, actor, artist, and reviewer of fright flicks…Who hates ya baby?

All “teenager” Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning who appears to be pushing thirty) wanted was to get her ass to a local shindig… too bad she almost hits Eegah (Richard Kiel, best known as Jaws from the James Bond series), a gigantic mother fuckin’ caveman, with her car… which is more common than one would assume. I mean, I would think the number of colossal caveman related auto accidents would hover around a solid zero, yet here we are…

Foxy Roxy informs her boyfriend, pompadour maestro/dune buggy enthusiast Tom Nelson (Arch Hall Jr., who soon performs his number one shit single Vicki) and her pulp-author pappy Robert Miller (Arch Hall Sr., who also directed and came up with the story for this here terror tale) about ol’ Captain Caveman, which spurns Bob to go looking for that sumbitch in his whirly-bird… but he never returns from the trip.

Tom shows concern the only way he can; by warbblin’ another standard substandard song (this one about a chick named Valerie… what is it with this cat and dames with names starting with “V”?) and manifesting once again his mutant power of creating backing vocals from thin air.

This attracts Eegah, doubtless thinking Tom’s voice was the mating call of whatever an Eegah would fuck… which eventually leads to Roxy being kidnapped and taken back to the brute’s “cave” (or hobbled together grey tent, whatever… ). You just know this is not going to end well for E-dawg… but before it does or doesn’t, Tom returns with that timeless classic Nobody Lives on the Brownsville Road which of course is about anal… and possibly a ghost…

As you can surmise from the above wicked words, EEGAH is one hell of a low-budget oddity, and it is sillier than some shit that’s silly… but it’s also entertaining, and made with a sense of honesty and heart that makes it charming as hell despite it’s flaws. I always lay this down; it doesn’t matter your level of skill, nothing is as important as putting a bit of soul into what you create, and nowhere does that hold more true than in our beloved horror biz.

Of course the film does generate laughs, with the constant caveman mumbling Eegah does being a prime example of the hilarity at hand, and those songs… and some of the set design… but fuck it; the film is wacky, surreal, and it entertains like a mother fucker, and that’s all yours cruelly needs to give it the scare-seal of approval!

As for bonus material we are presented the 1993 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that lampooned the film (and illustrates just how gorgeous the 4K restoration of the film on this disc truly is, as the print Joel and the ‘bots watch looks like hammered shit), as well as interviews with Arch Hall Jr. (who offers plenty of anecdotes and candid talk of the film’s production) and the aforementioned Joel Hodgson from MST3K.

If you think of this as King Kong for the teens of the early ’60s, produced with all the subtlety of a jackhammer to the ‘nads and with a budget of a home movie… you are in the ballpark of what EEGAH is… it’s also the type of film you’d catch at 2 A.M. on regional TV in the ’80’s, then wake up the next morning not sure that you didn’t dream the whole thing… in other words, just the type of picture I dig the living hell out of!

 

 

 

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