Eegah (1962)

The best way to understand cinema is to dive into the history of cinema. That could be researching the technology or the people that have changed the way movies worked. It could be looking into the trends that have influenced what movies were released at certain times. Or it could be watching the older movies that helped push forward the art form. Every movie has its place in film history. Every movie affected film in one way or another.

Bad movies are no different. There is a history within bad movies that has helped to push the film medium forward. Half of learning is making mistakes and figuring out how to not repeat them. That’s where the bad movies come in. They make the mistakes so that when filmmakers make something better, they know what not to do. A good movie will teach a person what to do and a bad movie will teach them the things to avoid. Both are legitimate learning experiences, and both are seeped in history.

That’s why it becomes important to look at older bad movies in terms of their historical context. They’ve made the movie mistakes that have shaped nearly everything after. Newer bad movies teach modern filmmakers what they shouldn’t be doing with modern film technology. Older bad movies showcased the earlier mistakes that were discovered, allowing newer filmmakers to find newer, more specific, problems. The older bad movies led the way into the newer bad movies, just as the older good movies led the way to newer good movies. There had to be a foundation to build upon.

One such older bad movie was Eegah, a 1962 film about a trio of people who discovered that giants were real. Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) was driving along a dark road when she almost crashed into a giant (Richard Kiel). She told her father, Robert (Arch Hall Sr.) about the giant. He went into the desert to search for it. When he didn’t come back, Roxy went after him with Tom Nelson (Arch Hall Jr.), a local guitar player that she had a thing for. Robert and Roxy were taken captive by the giant and soon learned a lot about the history of giants.

Eegah was essentially a low-budget retelling of the King Kong story. There was a giant being, only this time it was a giant man instead of a giant ape. And please don’t correct me saying that a man is an ape. That’s not the point here. A man went in search of the giant being. A woman was captured by the giant being. The woman was saved from the giant being. The giant being then went back to the city. It caused trouble and tried to retake the woman, only to be shot down and killed. It wasn’t the bullets that killed the giant. No no. It was beauty killed the beast.

However, where King Kong and its remakes succeeded, Eegah floundered. It didn’t have nearly the same level of quality as the classic giant ape movies. It took the basic story elements, slapped on a new package in the giant human, and slashed the production budget to the point that the wondrous elements could no longer be included. It turned a spectacle into something else entirely. It created one of the classic bad movies that people talked about for all the wrong reasons.

The place to start would be the nepotism. There are few times in Hollywood where nepotism truly works. A director casting their family in their projects will usually lead to audiences questioning if that was really the best casting choice. Eegah was directed by Arch Hall Sr. He was an actor turned producer who frequently cast his son in the projects he produced. In Eegah, Arch Hall Jr., the son, played the role of Tom Nelson. He was the lead romantic interest. Was he the right choice? Perhaps not. He did bring something to the role, though. There were three songs that he performed throughout Eegah, making it into a pseudo-musical.

Speaking of the music, that’s another thing that held Eegah back. It’s not that the music itself was all that bad. The songs were decent. They would be easily listenable outside of the movie. The problem that came with the music fell on the pacing of the film. Every time a song played, it was an entire song that played. That meant that an entire song’s worth of time was taken away from telling the story of the people and their interactions with the giant. With three full songs in there, that was three times when the movie had to pause so that a full song could play. One of those three times worked better than the others. Tom and Roxy were camping out in the desert. It was pretty much a campfire guitar moment where Tom started playing a song to soothe Roxy into the night. It felt more necessary than the other two songs, which were performed at parties. There was no need to feature full songs at parties that were simply meant to be party music and nothing more. The songs were good enough, though.

Even with some decent music in Eegah, the audio wasn’t the best. There was some wacky automated dialogue replacement (ADR) throughout the movie. It was especially apparent in the dune buggy scenes as Tom and Roxy searched for Roxy’s father in the desert. Tom sped over hills, through sand traps, and around curves. He got stuck once or twice, but that was the fun of driving a dune buggy. Roxy sure was having fun as a passenger, screaming like she was on a roller coaster. Yet none of her vocal excitement was seen on screen. It was all added into shots from behind, where her face couldn’t be seen. It sounded very studio made because, even if her face could be seen, there would have been no way to get usable audio from the dune buggy. The wind would have been whipping right through the microphone, creating static that would make everything else hard to hear. So the ADR work was done. It was only the basics, though. There were no effects of any kind to warp the audio and make it sound like it came from a dune buggy. It was just a clean studio sound that felt very out of place. It felt like a joke. They clearly didn’t have the money to make it any better.

The dune buggy went hand in hand with the lack of location work that Eegah had. There were four main locations. The first was a backyard with a pool. This was likely the toughest location to get, and it was probably the house of someone involved in the production. There was an empty road at night. There was a cave where the giant lived, which may have been a set designed to look like a cave. Finally, there was the desert. Filmmakers who work on the cheap must find locations that they won’t have to pay for to film in. The desert is one of those locations. Not too many people will want to travel to the desert unless they must. There won’t be too many interferences for the filmmaker. There won’t be anyone patrolling to make sure people aren’t filming. The problem, much like with the woods, is that no matter where in the desert a person goes, things look relatively similar. The location becomes mundane for the viewer as the visual stimulation wears off easily. Unless landmarks are found or different looking parts of the desert are used, the visuals will start to feel stale. It’s a trade-off for the cheap place to film.

Then there was the giant himself. The first thing to get out of the way was his name. Soon after he took Roxy and her father captive, they learned that the giant’s name was Eegah. That might not have been his actual name. He just kept saying the word “eegah” and they assumed that his name was Eegah. They didn’t know his language. They simply heard a word repeated and thought it was his name.

The more important thing about the giant was that he was played by a tall man. Unlike other movies that involved giant beings falling in love with beautiful women before terrorizing a city in their love, there weren’t any animation or effects tricks to present the giant. They simply cast a tall man and called it a day. Richard Kiel stepped into the role. He would later become famous playing the character Jaws in two James Bond films. He was a tall man, yes. Richard Kiel was seven feet and two inches tall. That was a tall man. But he wasn’t necessarily a giant. He was taller than those around him, but he wasn’t an unbelievable height. He was just bigger. It was the cheapest way to have a giant. Instead of using effects or perspective filming to make people look bigger, they got a man who stood a foot and a half above the other actors. It really showed how low budget the movie was that he looked pretty much like a normal guy in a cave man outfit.

Eegah was an important piece of bad movie history. It was one of those movies that became a lesson to all those who saw it and desired to make movies. It showed that with a low budget, a movie could be made. It also showed that sometimes a filmmaker must understand what a script requires and that a low budget could harm those aspirations. Eegah got made. That’s a feat. But the low budget led to nepotism, forced musical interludes, poor quality ADR, uninspired locations, and a giant that looked like a tall man and not a giant. The low budget kept Eegah from having many of the technical aspects that would have made it better. Would it have been a great film? That would depend on the creative team behind it and what they could do with the bigger budget. It would be a start, though.

Good movies and bad movies are both equally important when it comes to film history. There would be no good without the bad. There wouldn’t be the mistakes necessary to learn. There wouldn’t be the triumphs that highlight the aspects of film that do work. The good and the bad go together like peanut butter and jelly, only nobody is allergic to either of them. Film history is a learning experience. A budding filmmaker can learn what to do and what not to do. They can hone their craft through the experiences of others. They can turn their ideas into something special by seeing what works and what doesn’t. Every movie is important. Every movie has its place.

Now it’s time to toss a few final notes in here:

• There weren’t any actors from Eegah that worked on other Sunday “Bad” Movies, so I’m going to link to some other pre-1970s movies that have been covered. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (week 4), Teenage Zombies (week 298), The Terror of Tiny Town (week 326), Reefer Madness (week 339), Plan 9 From Outer Space (week 375), The Wasp Woman (week 389).
• Have you seen Eegah? What did you think of it? Was it a good learning experience for future filmmakers to know what not to do? Give me your thoughts and comments on Twitter or in the comment section.
• I’m always open to suggestions about what I should be checking out. Let me know what movies to watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies in the comments or on Twitter.
• Why not head on over to Instagram and check out Sunday “Bad” Movies? That sounds like a fun idea.
• One last thing before you go. It’s time to talk about what will be coming up in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Next week will feature a movie I saw once when it first came out. I enjoyed it then, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it good. It’s a movie called Beta Test, and I’ll be seeing it again for the next post. I’ll see you when that one is up.