Chalk it up to Arch’s poor musical material, his poor choice in movies (his car stealing epic The Choppers was at least silly fun, while this guitar epic is flat and fairly cartoonish), or more likely that Ric Flair-colored hair poofed up into some type of layered and stratified monstrosity that seems to predict the coming of other idiotically-coiffed music wannabes like Flock of Seagulls.

The beginning of the movie starts with about thirty-five minutes of opening credits. It always seems that with these low-budget dung piles that everybody who ever contributed one kernel of corn to the giant ball of crap the movie is, needs to have their name up there before the action starts. It’s especially silly in this case since all the names are either Arch Hall, Jr., Arch Hall, Sr., and Ray Dennis Steckler or their various pseudonyms.

While these credits are rolling (and rolling and rolling) we see Arch Hall, Jr. As Bud Eagle traipsing around L.A. past famous landmarks like the Capital Records building, that Chinese theater, and all those footprints and handprints in the sidewalk. Bud is understandably awe-struck as he attempts to match his hands with the prints left by television legend Greg Evigan or somebody.

He ends up at this greasy spoon where a kindly (we know she’s kindly because she’s so dang homely!) woman gives him a break on his bill, not charging him the extra penny on the coffee and donut Bud ordered.

Along with the old lady running the hash joint, an aspiring actress or go-go dancer or whatever she was supposed to be named Vickie is hanging out. She’s the innocent who falls for the guy trying to make it big and at some point the music business will come between them and break them apart.

Vickie starts talking to Bud and tells him that his little letter of introduction from the radio station in his hick town isn’t going to cut the mustard with the big guys at A&R so she tells him to come along with her to this talent show. (Her talent is something where she stands around dancing like someone dumped centipedes in her panties.)

Bud gets his big break when the guy who was supposed to go on and play his saxophone chickens out. Bud runs out there, trips gets back up, croaks out his white bread brand of rock and bore and the crowd goes absolutely nuts. Bud Eagle is a hit!

Mike McCauley (Arch Sr.) over at Fairway records sees him and knows that he has to sign him to a crooked deal immediately.

Mike tries to lay the law down on Bud, telling him that he can’t be seeing Vickie anymore because he needs to concentrate on his music. He sets Bud up in a sweet apartment, gets him a new guitar and hires local kids to manage Bud’s new fan clubs.

Bud is of course disgusted by this idea. He’s one of those “old school” types that wants people to like him because they really like him, not because Mike McCauley greased their palms with some bread.

Mike brainstorms with the kids he’s hired as to what sort of fad they should start. Luckily the idea for some kind of dance was nixed.

What was settled upon though was much, much worse. An eagle’s feather! Everyone will wear these lice-infested bird feathers in their hair to symbolize their slavish devotion to their prefab idol, Bud Eagle!

Bud wants out of things, but Mike lays a guilt trip on him about all the money he has invested in making him a big star. He says it’s something like $50,000 and even though Bud only has a few new suits, new guitar, and some disillusionment to show for all his work singing and recording, he agrees to stay on for six months and work diligently to pay off Mike’s investment

Mike’s henchman Steak meanwhile has told Vickie some lie about how Bud didn’t want anything to do with her and also has been intercepting all the letters to and from Bud’s brother from back home and writing his own letters instead.

And then there is disgruntled recording has-been Don Proctor. He shows up at Bud’s place drunk and smartens him up on the way the business works.

Just when it seems all is lost for Bud (he gets conned into working for Mike forever and Vickie sees him with another woman) a miracle occurs. Bud gets kidnapped!

Three dopey crooks that hang out at the greasy spoon where Bud met Vickie, kidnap Bud. Bud gets the gun away from them and decides that it would be okay to be kidnapped and to make Mike pay through the nose to get him back. This is an abysmal sidetrack to an otherwise routinely stupid film.

Unlike its companion film on the Something Weird DVD, The Choppers, Wild Guitar isn’t all that much fun to sit through. Bud is so stereotypically naive and hick-ish that you really don’t have a lot of empathy for him and find it equally hard to believe that he and his brother could outsmart a rash, let alone a mean old record promoter.

The story itself is simplistic of its portrayals of everyone, but not in an entertaining way like in The Choppers. Teaming the dull-witted Vickie with the dull-acting Arch Hall, Jr. doesn’t exactly set your TV on fire and you cringe whenever they try to have a moment of tenderness together. The only thing I could say that might make it worth your while to sit through is to check out Bud’s hairdo. It’s like an entirely new life form!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

For those of you who aren’t up on your mid-seventies Indian movement/hippie movies, Tom Laughlin plays a guy who’s half Indian and half something else named Billy Jack. Billy is a Vietnam vet who also is an expert in hap-ki-do. He has a woman named Jean who is a pacifist who runs the Freedom School out in New Mexico and spends most of the semester getting harassed by bigoted locals.

The film uses a pretty clumsy framing device by having a hospitalized Jean relate to some reporter everything that happened to lead up to the tragic shooting at the Freedom School. This allows the film to present a series of barely connected events with Jean’s narration tying these disparate happenings together. She even tells us a little about Billy’s trial!

The trial of Billy Jack ends anticlimactically and I felt a bit prematurely with a guilty verdict on involuntary manslaughter and a sentence of five to fifteen years in the pen. I was slightly worried at this point since I was under the impression that this movie was about a trial and as far as I could tell, it was all done and the star had lost and been locked away. What would the rest of the movie be about? Heck, what wouldn’t it be about!

See, the rest of the movie is a stunning kaleidoscope of unfocused ranting and raving about every social ill that was popular back in the seventies. The movie abandons any semblance of a story and Jane just starts telling us every little thing that those do-gooders at the Freedom School did.

There’s really no rhyme or reason to why and when any of this goes on. It’s almost as if director/star Laughlin and co-star Taylor trotted out every lame idea they’ve ever had to spread their brand of peace (Billy beats up people, Jean criticizes him for it) and put it into this movie.

Billy Jack disappears for long stretches of the movie and in the meantime we get the run down on the trouble those Freedom School kids have been causing. They tackle issues such as child abuse and Indian land rights and hold all sorts of festivals, including the infamous world’s largest band and drill team contest event called “1984 Is Closer Than You Think.” That must have looked snazzy on the concert t-shirts.

However blinded Tom and Delores are by their far left agenda, they know that the drive-in crowd came to see Billy Jack and not some idiotically-named marching band Olympics, so Billy gets released after doing 4 years of his 5-15 year sentence.

I assume this means that Billy is on parole which in my state would prohibit him from doing stuff like holding the lieutenant governor at gun point, smoking peace pipes, kicking people in the head, throat, knees, gut, and nuts, and they’d probably would want to him to get a steadier job than just “spiritual protector of the Indians and their lands.”

Luckily for us, Billy Jack isn’t the type of half-breed Vietnam vet to let the white man change his ways (we actually learn from Billy that we can only change from the inside!) and he does all this and lots more when he finally gets sprung.

The greatest moment in the movie (aside from Billy Jack slapping Jesus Christ) came when this little girl who we saw in the previous film singing at dinner time, has taken the four years Billy’s been in prison to get her next single in the can and ready to debut it at Billy’s coming home dinner.

A truly treacly piece of syrup that will have you asking for another two stacks of flapjacks just to soak it all up, the lyrics tell of Billy’s absence and the effect it has had on her. Here’s some sample lyrics: “Shed a tear, running dear. Don’t turn back Billy Jack. I am crying. Are you dying just for me?” It’s got a good beat and you can gag to it. I’d give it two boots upside your stupid head, hippie chick.

The film meanders here and there, lurching from issue to issue so that you’re never quite sure if there is actually anything important happening story-wise, aren’t sure who the bad guys are (The guys who want to take away the abused child the Freedom School is helping? The guys stealing the Indian lands? The doctors who won’t treat an Indian? Tom and Delores for being this damn self-important?) and wondering where Billy Jack is all the time these kids are exposing the corrupt practices of the bigot who runs the furniture rental store in town.

As for Billy, he spends an eternity going on a spiritual journey to find himself. This involves a series of increasingly ridiculous scenes that has him painted up all red and wearing some kind of sash like he just took first place in an Oompa-Loompa beauty pageant, all the while meeting a blue-painted version of himself in a cave. It all has to do with spirit guides and finding your center and all that self-improvement speak that makes you wonder if Tony Robbins was an advisor on the project.

Shortly thereafter and for the rest of the film, Billy would open up his strange brand of peaceful whup-ass on various people for various transgressions, while Jean would be there to berate him for doing so.

At the end of the movie, the government moves in and shoots up the joint and the movie demonstrates its subtly in getting its point across by having a soldier shoot a little one armed kid in the back, who was holding the cutest little rabbit I ever seen!

This is worse than your usual bad movie because its 170 minute running time has the power of two terrible films all rolled into one titanic destructive force. It’s really hard to watch them sap all the life out of Billy Jack, while Jean has merely degenerated into a shrill whiner, forever complaining about everything and doing nothing. (At least Billy breaks the occasional knee cap.)

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Is it Jimmy, the kid with the troubled past? Is it Marty, the malt shop owner who doesn’t like to give credit to the kids for sodas and burgers? Is it one of Jimmy’s gang of hotrodders?

Maybe it’s Runt, the dopey-looking slug who gets picked on by Jimmy’s gang of hotrodders despite him being Jimmy’s friend (though that would have to be pure pity on Jimmy’s part).

Could it be that creepy school janitor, Mr. Wilson, who doesn’t like cleaning up after a bunch of punks?

Heck, it might even be Jimmy’s little brother, Mike. He’s a four-eyed sissy with girlish voice and a secret past of his own. Though if he did turn out to be strangler, they might have to call the film Pre-Teen Strangler.

The movie really isn’t that much of a whodunit since most of the time is spent following Jimmy around as he periodically gets put under the umbrella of suspicion by the police and grounded by his parents.

Frankly, I wasn’t going into this one looking to unravel any densely-plotted mystery. I was hoping for some gang slang, bad music, and lots of posing by whitebread guys in leather jackets. If they could mix in some murders and a drag race, that would just be so much gang gravy.

Well, they did it and they did it all in just about an hour! Teen-Age Strangler himself wasn’t terribly active until the end of things, but I was having too much fun counting all the fake sports pennants hanging up at both the malt shop and in Jimmy’s bedroom to really mind all that much.

Jimmy is sort of secretly dating Betty since Betty’s folks are against Jimmy’s type of boy, despite him looking as clean cut as Wally Cleaver. It’s Jimmy’s membership in that rowdy group of racing freaks called the Fastbacks that’s probably causing them the most consternation.

Jimmy’s status in that group though didn’t seem to lend itself to too much worrying since he’s out making time with Betty and getting himself named a prime suspect in the slaying of her friend while the rough guys in the Fastbacks are out dragging where it isn’t sanctioned. Hey, it’s like one of the Fastbacks says, “drag it or drop it.” Though I can’t quite grasp the meaning of that statement, it does sound like words to live by.

Huntington P.D. puts its best man on the case in Lt. Anderson and he wastes no time in visiting Betty’s house to get the low down on what exactly she saw when she was running away screaming while her friend was dying an agonizing death.

Following textbook police procedure to the letter, he immediately gets in a shouting match with Betty’s dad about how he should be doing his job as a parent and making sure that Betty wasn’t out at all hours so that she could end up seeing murders.

Betty reveals that she thinks she saw that the killer was wearing a leather jacket with a bulldog emblem on it! “A bulldog! I think I saw a bulldog!” she screams as she collapses into tears while I collapsed into paroxysms of laughter. You see, the bulldog is the exclusive symbol of the Fastbacks!

All five Fastbacks are now under Lt. Anderson’s microscope and he hauls them in to find out which one did it. Perhaps not surprisingly, they all deny any involvement and so they are released into the custody of their parents who presumably have to promise that none of them will be allowed to strangle any more dames.

Back at the malt shop, another horror unfolds before our disbelieving eyes. Some girl gets up on the counter, proclaims her and this guy with a guitar the Huntington Astronauts, and starts singing one of those abominations that these low budget teen pictures traffic in.

This time, it’s something called “Yipe Stripes” and is apparently about striped clothes. Accompanied by the sort of dancing that that guy in Footloose surely had in mind when he wanted it banned, you’re left to goggle in amazement as the Drew Carey-lookalike Marty, begins shimmying behind the counter! I would also complain that as soon as the guy with the guitar started playing, invisible horns and drums began to mysteriously play along with him, but I had already suspended whatever disbelief this movie caused when no one started pelting the Huntington Astronauts with half-eaten burgers and empty parfait glasses.

A meaningless drag race and a silly confrontation with the killer that sees Lt. Anderson shooting his gun at Teen-Age Strangler through a broken window despite a prospective victim being in the line of the fire close out the movie.

Funny moments, chiefly involving Jimmy’s little wuss brother Mike, give the movie whatever value it has. Between Mike simpering on about how he let Jimmy take the rap for something he really did, getting kicked in the face by Jimmy for being a sniveling pansy, and Mike riding his bike out onto the drag racing course to give Jimmy a message from Lt. Anderson, before crashing his bike into a fence, the creepy little dingus steals the show.

This is the other feature on Something Weird’s Teenage Terror Drive-In Double Feature along with the rougher more gang-ish Teenage Gang Debs. Teen-Age Strangler starring Mike is the perfect chaser to all the deb action of the first film and will leave you debating with your friends which one of them showcased the worst song: This one’s ode to pin stripes or Teenage Gang Debs’ insane attempt to start a kung fu dance fad with “Black Belt.” Regardless of where you come out on that issue, Mike will surely end up being your favorite gang deb.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Terry has just moved with her two square folks from Manhattan to whatever scurve part of the east coast it is where guys in leather jackets carry switch blades, hang out in restaurants, and gossip endlessly about what group of goofs rumbled with what other group of goofs the Saturday night before.

Back in Manhattan, Terry was the deb of the leader of the Golden Falcons, but then her parents had to move so now she’s looking to join the Rebels. Just how cool are you if you have switch gangs like changing schools every time your parents move? And why aren’t you living with the leader of the Golden Falcons anyway? You are his deb, aren’t you Terry?

Terry wastes little time making friends with the kids in her new school, I mean gang, once she sashays into their hangout and accepts Nino’s invitation to stay awhile. Johnny, the charisma-impaired leader of the Rebels immediately takes a liking to her much to the consternation of his current deb, Pigface (I think that’s what Terry called her anyway).

Johnny fires Pigface as his broad, but gang rules state that if some new deb wants to move in on some other deb’s old man, they have to settle it Rebel-style. Okay, all together now: CATFIGHT!

What follows is a rather silly affair involving these two rolling around the pool hall floor, pulling each other’s hair, wrestling, tearing up clothes, and even biting! It’s pretty much as funny as it sounds, but also demonstrates one of the movie’s more annoying traits. During scenes like this one, it’s like the scriptwriter and the editor decided that it would be a good time to take a breather.

Like the DJ who puts on “American Pie” late at night, so that he can go take a dump, the movie almost urges its audience to go off and make a sandwich during these lengthy interludes. There’s no dialogue or plot advancement during these sequences and you’re treated to more of the same during scenes of knife fights, rumbles, and most frightening of all, at the big dance. Clearly added to pad out the minimalistic story, these bits only serve as an unwelcome interruption to classic gang dialogue and the laughable schemes that Terry cooks up in her quest to become queen of Gangland, U.S.A.

Once Terry becomes Johnny’s deb, he demands that she let him carve his initials into her because he always marks his women. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, because that way if you happen to leave your deb laying around the clubhouse, you don’t have to worry about Nino mistakenly picking her up.

In spite of all the rights and privileges that go along with being the main squeeze of the Prez (including exclusive access to Johnny’s private room where he keeps trophies like different blades, a cheesy sign on the wall saying something about how great the Rebels are, and what looks to be a pair of black lace bloomers tacked up on the wall above the bed), Terry decides that her avenue towards greater powers lies with Nino.

Johnny is Nino’s best friend and is reluctant to succumb to Terry’s advances, but all thoughts of friendship and repercussions are tossed aside once Terry plays her trump card. That would of course be her asking Nino if he wasn’t man enough to handle her and Johnny. The next thing we know, Nino is in Johnny’s private suite making time with the First Lady of the Rebels!

It doesn’t take long for Johnny to wonder just what the devil is going in his trophy room and demands that Nino come out and explain himself. He does just that with a blade that Terry hands him from the trophy room. Oh, the irony! Betrayed by not only your own deb, but by one of your own blades! Oh, and by your best friend, too. Et tu, Nino?

Nino becomes the new Prez and Terry asserts herself as the power behind the throne by demanding that Nino’s old deb be taken to a back room and lined up for the rest of the guys in the gang. That should make her popular with the male contingent of the gang if not with the remaining debs. Terry provides some great lines during all this, going on about how Nino’s old deb was dirty and that she’s just a “crud.”

But Terry isn’t going to allow her second term as First Lady to be consumed by such administrative matters as disposing of the crud in the gang. She wants Nino to make a play for more territory and power, though she never is able to provide much of a reason for it. Her attempts to orchestrate a rumble with a rival gang as well as her setting up some other Rebels eventually lead to the sort of disaster that reminded me of the biblical saying “the cruds shall inherit the Earth.”

Fans of movies containing dated hood slang and hilarious dance crazes will no doubt want to join the Rebels for this particular DVD rumble. One song in particular (the catchy “Black Belt”) provides us with the best moments of the film when you get to see the Rebels do a dance that incorporates kung fu moves into it. I think you’ll agree that that was one pointless scene that didn’t go on nearly long enough.

This is another double feature, extra-loaded DVD from Something Weird, so even if Teenage Gang Debs by itself is fairly unremarkable, the fact that it’s also served up along with Teen-Age Strangler, a couple of shorts about VD and delinquents, trailers, and other stuff means that you will have little trouble getting plenty of gang bang for your buck.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

J.D. was of course the country hick who pined away for the girl next door, Willadean. Though he would no doubt chalk up his inability to even get a whiff of Willadean to the unfair competition provided by the city slicker who just moved into the neighborhood, an impartial observer would surely have no choice, but to lay the blame squarely at J.D.’s watermelon-stained feet.

J.D. and his younger brother Freddy maintain a super cool bachelor pad tree house they use to spy on Willadean, her dad’s melon patch, and the new kid (Harley) from the city they immediately tag as a sissy, probably because of his fancy shirt and tie and over-moussed hair.

As all us real American folk from the Heartland are prone to do whenever we see a wimpy kid from the city, J.D. & Freddy set about giving him a good old-fashioned country welcome. By pummeling him with rocks and dirt clods!

They all become fast friends though once J.D. sees that Harley has a horse. And while J.D. is always eager to scheme against Harley in an effort to secure the affections of Willadean, he doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of “paybacks are a bitch.”

Thus we are treated to the scene of Harley hitting his horse in a sensitive spot while J.D. is riding it causing the horse to throw J.D. in a bunch of mud while Harley, Freddy and Willadean laugh uncontrollably!

But like all great clueless virgins everywhere, J.D. has that never say die attitude that is usually quite misplaced. The remainder of the film details the two cunning plans J.D. has to win over Willadean while simultaneously destroying any chance Harley has with her. Proving that the trickery he fell for with the horse was no aberration, J.D.’s plans are notable for one thing: backfiring badly.

His first plan is clearly the stupider of the two (mainly because no sane person could ever believe the second plan even qualified as a plan at all) and involved Willadean’s father and his gigantic seed melon.

A seed melon is apparently a large watermelon that is grown for the purpose of harvesting all the seeds so that you can grow a whole field of freakishly large melons the next summer. It’s guarded day and night by Willadean’s dad, so J.D. figures that if they can steal it, Willadean will be impressed. Because nothing impresses a girl like ruining her father’s livelihood.

J.D. though eager to look awesome in Willadean’s eyes, is not so keen to actually do any hard work or take any risk on her behalf.

He goads Harley into stealing the melon, but shockingly the theft goes horribly wrong when the next morning arrives and Willadean’s father goes into a psychotic rage in front of everyone when he sees the melon is missing. He screams, stomps melons, kicks melons and even bashes them with his rifle before his fury is spent.

Harley proves that big city kids are no good at pulling off big time heists when his conscience and good upbringing get the better of him and he owns up to what he did to Willadean’s dad. He even produces all the seeds from the melon in an attempt to make amends. Willadean is impressed by his courage so the crafty J.D. devises a final stunt to become Willadean’s favorite.

He’s going to make Harley spend one hour in a haunted house that he’s rigged up with all sorts of scary tricks. And he also makes Willadean go up to the second story of the house and back in order to allow her to join his club. Yup, definitely still a virgin.

J.D. gets hosed again when Freddy and Willadean catch on to his game and warn Harley which allows Harley to turn the tables on him. But just as another idiotic plan of his is looking like its going in the opposite direction of Pantytown, the kids discover a bunch of money in the house!

And they discover a tramp with a Chihuahua also in the house! And the tramp used to be millionaire! And none of it had anything to do with anything! At least it wasn’t actively ruining J.D.’s chances with Willadean. Like everything J.D. did!

Surprisingly fun and entertaining, For the Love of Willadean is highlighted by Sammy the Way-Out Seal stars Michael McGreevey as J.D. and Billy Mummy as Freddy.

J.D.’s desperation to please Willadean is portrayed in amusing fashion as he constantly shifts his views to mirror hers while Freddy hilariously complains and disagrees with all the stupid stuff J.D. gets him involved with because of J.D.’s infatuation with Willadean.

The suspenseful watermelon theft is worth a viewing all by itself! It’s like watching The Great Escape in a vegetable garden!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Instead of an interesting rampaging monster epic though, you have a movie hampered by its silly premise. Even worse, the monster hardly rampaged at all, making only a few off screen appearances until the very end when a guy in caveman make up starting running around the woods, chucking axes at park rangers and causing pretty gals to faint dead away.

Dunsfield University is one of those decent types of colleges where people like the clean cut and handsome Troy Donahue go to school and help out their professors unloading giant fish, while walking their dogs.

Professor Donald Blake has somehow managed to get Dunsfield U to purchase a big, prehistoric fish from Madagascar. This fish is the coelacanth and is famous for being a “living fossil” because it is thought to have not really evolved over the course of its 400 million year history. In fact it was thought extinct until some yokel caught one with his Zebco back in 1938!

The fish is packed in ice and some of it melts leaving a bloody mess on the ground which Troy’s dog Sampson promptly licks up. The next thing you know, Sampson is going after Blake’s girlfriend so Troy and Blake tackle the dog with a blanket and haul it off to the vet. In the process, the dog also bites Blake.

Sampson is kept in the lab for observation and Blake observes that Sampson has grown really big teeth. He thinks this is odd, but he never stops to wonder if he himself will soon be growing those really bitching fangs.

Blake also cuts his hand on the fish’s teeth. Then he puts his wounded hand into the bloody water that still remains in the tub he’s hauling this thing around in. Now, instead of acting like a disinfectant as you might expect bloody fish water to do, it actually has a different effect. It makes Blake a little warm, a little weak, and a whole lot primitive!

Every scientist who studies old time fish knows what happens next: monster rampage ending with the death of a hot chick! Blake’s girlfriend then brings the law down on his place when she finds him out back with the corpse of Nurse Molly. You know how jealous broads can get!

The cops suspect Blake, but the physical evidence is confusing because instead of the business card with Blake’s name laying across the dead girl, they find large fingerprints and big nasty footprints. They also find Blake’s tie clasp, but no one pays that too much mind and immediately settle on the whole “someone is trying to kill Blake and/or frame him for murder” gag.

Back on campus Troy and his girlfriend are making out behind a tree when suddenly, they get chased by a gigantic dragonfly!

The dragonfly pursues them across campus right to Donnie’s lab. Donnie realizes what’s going on and he opens the window to let the dragonfly in. (He wants to study it you know.)

No one notices that some blood from the dragonfly drips into this his pipe. One murdered cop later and the movie really begins to reek like the fish it’s obsessed with. How else to explain the sequence involving Donnie calling Madagascar and the head of the university being outraged that he has spent all this department money on a long distance phone call?

The Dean stomps over to see Donnie and there’s a big pow wow where Donnie goes on and on about how something in the plasma of the fish causes evolutionary regression and that it affects the person doing all the killing because the fish was treated with gamma rays to preserve it.

The idea that something in the blood of this fish could make another species regress makes absolutely no sense, but since gamma rays were mentioned who knows what could happen, right?

Dubious scientific analysis aside, the movie completely tanks at the end (though I did like that dude getting an ax in the face) when Donnie goes up to the mountains to study the effects of the fish blood.

He injects himself once, goes on a rampage killing the park ranger and harassing his girlfriend, then when the cops show up, he’s back to normal and injects himself again so that the monster can be destroyed.

Here’s a idea, Donnie: if you never inject yourself again with this slop, you won’t ever turn into the monster again.

A completely ludicrous ending that one suspects was done merely because all these monster on the loose movies end like that. Laughable science and consistently dimwitted behavior of the main character prevent this movie from being much of anything other than a very brief and not too accurate educational lesson about ancient bugs and fish.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

When we last left Merlin Jones, he was embroiled in some legal controversy that ended up with his chimp Stanley having to testify on his behalf. Somehow that all worked out for him and now we find ourselves back in court with Merlin, his girlfriend Jennifer, Stanley, and Judge Holmsby.

This time Merlin is attempting to adopt Stanley as his kid. The judge won’t allow Merlin to adopt the chimp, but the judge isn’t the kind of heartless judiciary type to get in the way of some crazy-assed plot possibilities, so he does grant Merlin status as Stanley’s guardian, which I think means that Merlin can steal Stanley’s Social Security checks.

Merlin goes home and immediately begins his latest experiment on Stanley. He tries to get Stanley to brush his teeth. But after Merlin leaves Stanley alone to answer the door, somehow or other that rascally chimp knocks a bunch of bubble bath into the sink with the water running and the next thing you know there’s something like fifty thousand cubic feet of bubbles filling Merlin’s bathroom!

Merlin follows that blazing success up with a more involved experiment that has him hooking up curlers to Stanley’s head at night that are also connected to a record player. The record being played is the smah hit “Merlin instructs Stanley on his morning chores.”

Yes, Merlin has concocted a way to get people to learn by listening to instructional materials while they sleep. This dovetails nicely with the latest crisis that Midvale’s football team is experiencing. This time, their dire circumstance is that they have to pass their classes if they want to play football! Egads! This sounds like the machinations of some faculty member who hates football just because he didn’t make the team years ago!

Luckily, Judge Holmsby is an alum and football player and is determined to find an “honest way to cheat” so that his players can stay on the team. How ever will they get all that English literature into their stupid jock heads? If only there was a quick and easy way to upload it all into the smooth surface of their brains.

So Merlin hooks up two football players that need smartening up to his sleep-learning device, including the ape-like Norman from the previous movie, and it works! Of course everyone thinks they cheated and there’s a little drama where the board of regents has to decide whether to expel Merlin and the two football players.

It doesn’t take a Merlin Jones to know that the regents will somehow decide that “an honest way to cheat” is just fine, so long as it is all done in time for bowl season. The football team is saved!

But the football team is still in danger! You see, this guy who hates the team has come up with a donor who will donate a million dollars to Midvale, but only on the condition that they disband the football team. Can even the unholy alliance of Merlin Jones and Judge Holmsby figure a way out of this one?

They don’t have to because a guy shows up willing to donate ten million dollars to Midvale if someone can prove his grandfather wasn’t nuts when he wrote a children’s book about flying without mechanical assistance. I’m starting to think that in this case, screenwriters Alfred Lewis Levitt and his wife Helen Levitt weren’t using their pseudonyms Tom and Helen August just because they were blacklisted.

Merlin is put in charge of coming up with a contraption that he can pedal and fly and you get the added bonus of him inventing a drink that gives him a burst of adrenaline-fueled power. (Thankfully tried out on Stanley first who promptly goes ape and destroys the lab single-handedly.)

Merlin’s oblivious enthusiasm for every idiotic scheme he gets roped into carries the movie along which is really a credit to Tommy Kirk who has an ability to make swallowing all the poorly thought out and written material easier than it really ought to be.

Annette is still relegated to the role of flummoxed gal pal in this one, even more so than in the previous one. The Judge’s character though actually gets expanded and moves from grumpy establishment guy to Merlin’s partner in crime, his love for college football an understandable impetus for turning to outlandish pseudoscience.

If you’ve seen the first one, you know exactly what you’re getting this time around. Except less Stanley and more Beach Boys. Which is precisely the sort of experiment even Merlin Jones wouldn’t be gullible enough to undertake.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Mrs. Hobbs has secured the use of a house out on the west coast and everyone is coming along whether they like it or not. The Hobbs family still has two ungrateful and moody brats living at home with them. There’s the girl who is very self-conscious of her new braces. We’ll call her Metal Mouth. Then there’s the boy who is addicted to TV. We’ll call him America’s Youth. Also joining them once they get out to the coast are two grown daughters and their families.

Each family comes with its own problem, but the most interesting thing is that one of the daughters is married to America’s favorite flesh-eating G.I., John Saxon! John amazed us when he went nuts in Cannibal Apocalypse and he amazes again as the uppity egghead college professor who has a hankering for the dumb, foreign blonde gal that’s malingering on the beach the Hobbs’ vacation home is perched upon.

The movie focuses on Roger’s reaction to the insanity that constantly assaults his senses during the time when he’s supposed to be relaxing. The house is one source of trouble the film weakly attempts to mine for laughs. There’s the expected problems such as the water not working correctly (this usually involves someone getting sprayed with a geyser of water from the kitchen sink), an impossibly complicated pump that Roger can’t figure out how to work, but the plumber fresh out of the neighbor’s cesspool has no problem with (cesspool is funny, right?), and various stairs, banisters, and doorknobs breaking off at inopportune times.

The problems with the house though are merely background noise on this vacation when compared to what a dysfunctional load of Hobbs DNA the rest of the family turns out to be.

Roger stands around trying to puzzle out what’s up with the failing marriages of his two grown daughters that includes one husband being unemployed and the grandchildren being undisciplined brats.

Roger also has to find a way to reach out to his young son and does so by taking him on a sail boat ride and getting so lost at sea that they almost die. That particularly uninvolving scene went on for so long that I was hoping they’d both start gulping ocean water until their tongues swelled up and they suffocated.

Roger also manages to solve Metal Mouth’s problem of not being liked by boys by forcing her to go to a dance and then paying every guy there five bucks to dance with her. One guy turns out to be Fabian and after taking Roger’s five bucks, discovers that he likes Metal Mouth enough to sing the hit song “Cream Puff” (a singularly hideous bit of tuneless trash) with her and return Roger’s five bucks!

Roger’s next problem to solve is the unemployed husband’s situation. Even though Roger’s son-in-law bailed out and went home earlier, he somehow has landed a job interview with General Research.

The only hitch is that the head of General Research himself has to okay him before he can get the job. This means he has to come down to Roger’s vacation house to hang out for a few days to see if the kid is suitable – even though the kid isn’t even there!

Roger goes bird watching with the guy and ends up beating him up later that night due to a misunderstanding involving this guy’s wife, Roger, and a steam valve in the bathroom. After this guy leaves in a huff the next morning, guess who calls up later to excitedly announce that he’s landed a job with General Research? Roger, your crazy scheming has paid off again!

Roger’s simple-minded and unconventional solutions to vexing and deep-seated issues are annoying partly because of how unrealistic they are, but mostly because they just aren’t that funny!

And is watching Jimmy Stewart walking weirdly while looking for birds supposed to get me to do anything more than marvel that a legend like Stewart had no problem looking stupid in a pallid movie, all in an attempt to throttle a laugh out of a script already choking on predictability and poor pacing? (John Saxon’s story line was particularly woefully underdeveloped and totally forgotten about for a good chunk of the movie and only explained away as things were wrapping up.)

Stewart and co-star Maureen O’Hara give the film a level of professional respectability it otherwise wouldn’t be worthy of, but in the end, this vacation is no more fun than the one you’d likely have to endure with your own family.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

There isn’t a story per se going on in this one – it’s more of an episodic slice of life affair, detailing a few days in the topsy-turvy life of Merlin Jones, a guy that spends his time driving around town with a helmet containing lots of wires and electrodes on his head.

Things begin at good old Midvale Vocational Institute with Merlin working on a really souped up EEG machine when some wire touches another wire and the next thing you know, Merlin’s helmet is electrified and he’s flopping around like a kid who really does need to wear a helmet.

The next thing you know, Merlin isn’t dead, brain damaged, or even wet his pants, but he has acquired a brand spanking new super power! He can hear other people’s thoughts!

So how long do you think it is before he hears somebody’s thoughts and ends up mistaking what they’re thinking for some type of crime spree they’re planning? About half a day. (He had to try his powers out in the library before he really got down to business.)

But who is this miscreant that’s plotting and scheming all these diamond heists? A judge! But not just any judge – it’s the very judge who has sworn to crack down on all those college inventors that are always running Midvale’s red lights with their EEG helmets and their EKG codpieces on. College inventors just like Merlin Jones!

Merlin eventually convinces the cops that he can read minds, but they still won’t go dig up the judge’s rose bushes to find the diamonds he’s hidden there. Merlin immediately goes to Terror Alert Level 5 and gets girlfriend Jennifer (Annette Funicello) to grab a shovel and head out with him under cover of darkness to start digging the evidence up on his own!

Merlin gets busted for digging up the flowers and everyone goes into the judge’s house where the judge explains that he has all these thoughts about crime and stuff because he is really secretly best-selling crime novelist Lex Fortas.

When it was all done, I was thinking, “well that was pretty good – we had some misunderstandings, some solid gags in the library where everyone was thinking funny stuff, and a kid with a helmet on his head, but you know what would have really elevated Merlin Jones’ game from role-player to franchise player? A chimp!

But how to work the chimp into things? How indeed. Merlin’s science class begins a unit on hypnotism so the second half of the film concentrates on his efforts to hypnotize animals! I couldn’t help but feel like I was witnessing one of the great moments in cinema history when I was watching Tommy Kirk trying to hypnotize a cat.

Next stop is the research lab housing Stanley the chimp, who is being watched by Norman, a football player who is mean to Stanley. Merlin uses his hypnotic powers to get Stanley to “stand up for his rights” and this involves Stanley punching out Norman and causing Norman to go crashing into a bunch of beakers and getting conked on his noggin.

Merlin is brought up on assault charges and the truth comes out about how Norman mistreats Stanley and in the end the judge issues protective orders preventing either Merlin or Norman from harassing Stanley.

After the case is over, the judge smells a good plot for the eagerly awaited next Lex Fortas novel and enlists Merlin and his expertise in hypnotism. The judge wants Merlin to hypnotize him into committing a crime. (“Nothing felonious”, the judge says. “A misdemeanor will do.”)

Following the perhaps not unexpected botched scheme to hypnotize the judge into kidnapping Stanley, Merlin somehow finds himself on trial for the crime instead!

He tells Jennifer in an amusing jail house scene that he is going to try and use an old oriental method of hypnosis that just involves hand gestures and music on the judge in court to get him to recall that he really stole the chimp. I dare you not to snicker when they’re in court and Jennifer is making a kazoo noise with a napkin while Merlin is using all these swami-style hand motions on the judge.

There are enough moments of dopey teen inventor fun here to keep fans of such things mildly satisfied. Kirk is actually pretty good at selling his good natured enthusiasm for his experiments and gets off some nice facial expressions during the stranger occurrences he encounters.

Annette doesn’t have a lot to do in this, other than play the befuddled and put upon gal pal, but she generates some laughs when she’s visiting Merlin in jail and utters every bit of cliched jail conversation you could think of.

The first half of the movie is a bit bland and any yuks you’ll get are mainly in the second half, but it’s like I always say, “a half a movie starring a chimp is always better than a whole movie without a chimp.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

This is another silly Martian invasion movie. You know how those Martians are. They’re always giving our planet the bugged-eyed once over because of its really sweet location in the universe.

In this case, the usual invasion plan has been modified a bit to try and trick teenyboppers into watching the movie. See, Mars has gone into some kind genetic free fall (probably because they kept sending their best and brightest to Earth in past invasion attempts) and the result is that for every 100 male Martians there is only one female Martian. I think you know what happens when you have a planet load of horny Martians: road trip to Earth!

Just how exactly is this devious plot going to unfold? What sort of demented scheme have the Martians come up with this time to steal our nation’s most precious (and crabby) natural resource? Well, they kind of just send a coded message to our military with this cryptic statement: Mars needs women. Egads! What could it all mean?

Later we get some communications from the Martian leader about how they don’t have enough hot babes on the red planet and just need to score about five slutty girls and they’ll be peacefully on their way. You can imagine that we aren’t too thrilled with the prospect of some of our finer slices of grade A hooch being beamed out to some loser planet that sends its invaders out in ugly gold saucers.

Our military takes a break from the Cold War to deal with this threat and the result is the liberal use of stock footage of lots of different types of airplanes flying around. Just so you don’t get too bored and think that MGM somehow accidentally mastered eighty minutes of the Discovery Wings digital cable channel onto your DVD, they also intersperse these dull, grainy shots with dull, static shots of a loud speaker that constantly gives us updates on the progress of the stock footage!

Finally, Tommy Kirk materializes into the secret military room with the loud speaker. He’s dressed in one of those sissy shiny skin tight get ups that Martians without women seem to favor and he was trying to reset his big Dating Game plan to the top brass. They didn’t like what they heard, so Tommy disappeared and he and his crew land in Houston, Texas!

Tommy leads this pack of geeks in a fairly unconvincing manner (he tries so hard to be an emotionless Martian, but then has a crying scene with Yvonne Craig at the end of the movie) as they land at the old abandoned ice factory in the northeast part of town.

Why have they chosen to land at the old abandoned ice factory? Because even though it has been condemned and shut down by the city for years, it still has a valuable supply of chemicals that they can mix up and make some crap that will freeze people so they can be sent back to Mars.

After stealing some earth clothes, they head out to their assigned spots to go pick up broads! The first guy shows us that he’s got his head screwed on right, when he immediately hits the strip club down the street. There he ogles a stripper strutting her stuff, though since this was a made-for-TV movie, she just dances in a dress most of the time and doesn’t really sport the moves you would expect from an exotic dancer that has been targeted by interplanetary studs bent on making her their love slave.

The next guy also shows us that all Martians aren’t stupid because he ends up at a college football game! When you only have $25,000 to shoot your flick and about 50 bucks went to tickets for a football game, it’s understandable that you’d want to milk that location for all it was worth. And milk it they did. We must have seen the entire first quarter, before we finally see the Martian going after Baylor’s homely homecoming queen!

Tommy and his buddy are busy hanging out at hotel bars and pretending to be reporters for some reason so they haven’t scrounged themselves up a prom date yet.

Finally Tommy hypnotizes a real reporter into leaving his hotel room and steals his press credentials so that he can go visit the lecture that famed space geneticist, Dr. Marjorie Bolen (Craig) is putting on. She’s a nerd that none of the reporters take seriously except for Tommy.

Tommy asks her some really good question about chromosomes and the next thing you know, they’re going out on a date to the planetarium. Never mind that these Martians are on a tight schedule and must leave Earth in 24 hours for no good reason.

They hang out some more doing stuff like taking walks, visiting the wing of the museum devoted to Marge’s dead dad, and Marge leaking the army’s secret plan to secretly raid the Martian’s secret lair at the old abandoned ice factory!

Without reservation, I can say that this movie trawls new depths in its jejune exploration of the idiotic conceit that aliens from another world would actually want our women. (Haven’t they seen Earth’s divorce rate?)

Worse than the lame concept of the film though is the utter lack of anything remotely resembling competence by all involved. The film is a collection of snooze-inducing scenes with people doing little of interest except listening to loudspeakers, walking around staring at women and going to college football games. The whole “filmed on location in Texas” look gives the movie a feeling that we’re watching an H.G. Lewis movie with no gore or even his trademark memorably bad style. Without a doubt, the worst movie about Martians stealing our broads ever committed to film.

© 2010 MonsterHunter