EEGAH (1962)

As the credits roll, we hear beatnik jazz music as the camera pans past several mummified bodies in a cave. Cut to nighttime in what looks to be a California suburb on the edge of a desert. Roxy (Marilyn Manning) leaves a dress shop and stops at a gas station where her boyfriend Tom (Arch Hall Jr.) works. They make plans to meet at a country club party and she heads off for the club. On a desert road, Roxy suddenly sees a giant bearded man dressed in a caveman outfit (Richard Kiel), standing in the middle of the road holding a dead deer. He tries to beat her with the deer carcass but when Tom comes pulling up behind her, the giant is scared away. At the party, people don't believe her story but the next day, she and Tom and her father Robert (William Watters) head out to the desert and find huge human footprints. Robert hires a helicopter to take him up to Shadow Mountain to investigate. There he comes face to face with the giant, who drags him back to his cave (the one from the credits with the mummies). The next day, Tom and Roxy take a dune buggy out to the desert to look for Robert who doesn't show up at his appointed meeting place. The two spend the night in the desert and the next morning, the giant (who winds up being called Eegah for the guttural common utterance he frequently makes) spirits Roxy off to his cave. Eegah doesn't seem to be dangerous, and he frequently talks to the mummies, who Robert figures out are his long-dead family. Eegah seems to be the last surviving caveman. He feeds his new friends, lets Roxy shave him, and brings her flowers, but eventually Tom finds and frees them. Using a cloth with Roxy's scent on it, Eegah follows the three back to town where he eventually disrupts a country club pool party. Roxy is sympathetic to the caveman, but the climax is a variation on the King Kong ending in which "beauty killed the beast."

This drive-in B-film has a reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, but I have a fondness for it based on my history with it. It came out when I was 6 or 7 when I was just getting interested in monster movies and I loved the scary ads that ran on TV for it with a voice intoning "Eegah!" One night when I had drifted off to sleep on the couch, my mom woke me by whispering "Eegah" in my face. I woke up screaming. My poor mom didn't think I would be affected like that, but it's a memory that is vivid to this day, some sixty years later. I didn't get to see the movie until my college days, and by that time I was more interested in the male lead, Arch Hall Jr., who I thought was a cute blond surfer-type. Nowadays, I tend to agree with the online reviewer who says Hall looks like "Michael J. Pollard hit by a shovel," but he still has his cute moments, and though his acting would never win any awards, he fits the teeny-bopper B-lead role just right. Hall apparently had ambitions to be a pop singer so he sings some songs here, not terribly well, but really no worse than the average non-celeb singing you would hear in a 60s beach movie. Oddly, though he sings them to Roxy, one song is called "Vickie" and one is called "Valerie." Go figure. Manning (pictured at right with Hall) is a serviceable damsel in distress; she's not exactly good but not the worst I've seen. (I'm doing lots of damning with faint praise.) Watters, who plays her father, is actually Arch Hall Sr., who also produced, wrote and directed under a pseudonym. Like his son, he hits his marks and says his lines with varying degrees of conviction, and we'll say no more. Eegah himself, 7 foot tall Richard Kiel (pictured at top), went on to pop culture fame as the villain Jaws in a couple of James Bond movies. His only dialogue consists of saying "eegah" and other grunted nonsense syllables, but he does look menacing enough most of the time to be believable as a scary caveman. (More faint praise.) This is not a very good movie, and it deserves the MST3K treatment it got, but there are certainly worse ones out there, and bad movie fans will like it. I might even try to dig up a couple of other Arch Hall Jr. movies. [YouTube]