31 Days of Cheese: Day 25 - Eegah!

Our slog though Z-movie hell continues….with the 1962 film Eegah.

Eegah. Oh God. Why. Why Eegah? Why did they make this? What the hell were they thinking?

Anyway the story is that somewhere near Palm Springs California a 7 foot, two inch tall cave man is living. A young girl, Roxy, almost runs into him one night, then her father pursues him into his desert home followed by Roxy and her boyfriend Tom. After some misadventures, the trio find and then escape from Eegah who then follows them back into Palm Springs, where after disrupting a buffet dinner, he finds Roxy and Tom and is shot dead.

The horror is in the details of course. Eegah is played by Richard Kiel in an early role. He’s very very skinny and has for about 2/3rds of the film wears a very very fake looking beard. He walks about muttering gibberish and with the word “Eegah” popping in from time to time.

The whole thing was masterminded by Arch Hall Sr. who apparently cast his secretary as his daughter Roxy and his son Arch Hall Jr. as Tom.

Tom, Arch Hall Jr., is well, let’s be blunt, is not easy on the eyes. Plop a lot of over greased blonde hair on the stop of a cabbage patch kid and subject it to radiation and you’ll get some idea of what Tom looks like. That he sings just makes it worse. He sings one song out in the desert playing on an acoustic guitar while we hear violins and a chorus of female voices. It’s funny and makes you want to hurt yourself at the same time.

Not that Arch Sr. is much better – he’s been dipped in skin bronzer and sports the kind of thin child molester mustache that people on the neighborhood watch list wear. To top it off there is a weird icky undercurrent between Roxy and Arch Sr. that makes their scenes hard to watch (not that the rest of the film is easy to watch we’re talking relative terms here).

The ickiness all comes together in the scene were Eegah gets shaved.

What happens, plot things that are too tedious to recount land Roxy and Arch Sr. in Eegah’s cave. There, Roxy, in an effort to distract Eegah from jumping her bones, shaves her dad (why he brought a shaving kit into the desert in the first place is not explained ). Eegah then indicates that he wants to a trim as well. As Roxy shaves him we then see so much more of Richard Kiel’s tongue than anybody could be comfortable with. And really what kind of director’s vision is it that insists on having two shaving scenes in one film? Never mind I don’t want to know.

Rife with bad songs, bad acting and muttered gibberish this is a long painful slog in the desert.

Enjoy with a buffet.