“Holy smoke! A swimming pool!”

Drake’s rating: The Fender Jazzmaster is the coolest thing in this flick

Drake’s review: One of the first reviews I wrote for this site a few years ago was The Choppers, a low-budget drive-in flick that thrust Arch Hall, Jr. upon an unsuspecting world. Emboldened by the fact that Justin didn’t immediately ban me from Mutant Reviewers, I went to the Arch Hall well a second time with that Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite Eegah!, the tale of a wannabe teen pop star, his 30-year-old girlfriend, and the seven-foot-tall caveman who tries to come between them.

Granted, that review surprisingly didn’t result in a lifetime ban either, but I did want to avoid the stigma of becoming “that Arch Hall guy” around the Mutant Offices. I really prefer “That ‘70s Guy,”* if for no other reason than the film careers of both Halls was pretty much over by then.

So for reasons lost to the mists of time, Arch Hall, Sr. was determined to make his son, Arch, Jr., into a teen pop sensation. Sure, in hindsight, that’s completely delusional. After all, nothing about the younger Hall screams of star potential. Lacking in charisma, vocal talent, and acting ability, Junior had a brief career in front of the camera in the early ‘60s and then left his little corner of Hollywood entirely to go fly planes.

But if you look at it through a more modern lens… nope. The fact that six decades have passed doesn’t mean a thing in this case. Junior wasn’t completely lacking in musical talent, but he did not have the makings of a pop idol, even in retrospect. And nowhere is that more apparent than in Wild Guitar, a flick that goes all-in on the theme of Hall as a rock star.

Here Junior plays Bud Eagle, a former resident of Spearpoint, South Dakota, who’s made the big trip to Hollywood, CA in search of fame and fortune. Guitar in hand, Bud’s first stop is Marge’s Koffee Kup Cafe, where he’s derided as a “hick” by the other patrons. And to be fair to Marge’s clientele, Bud just ain’t too bright.

Vickie (Nancy Czar, Winter A-Go-Go), one of Marge’s regulars, takes pity on poor Bud. She takes him to a local variety show that she’s working on as a dancer and Bud is appropriately wide-eyed and full of wonder. But when the featured musician gets sick at the last minute, who can possibly step in at the last second? If you’re thinking of the lad who was no doubt second runner-up in the previous year’s Spearpoint High School talent show, then give yourself a gold star.

Putting on a middling performance that nevertheless turns him into an overnight sensation, Bud comes under the wing of talent scout and manager Mike McCauley (Arch Hall, Sr. under the stage name William Watters), a flimflam artist who promises Bud the moon while not-so-surreptitiously putting the young musician in his debt. And aiding Mike in his sometimes less than subtle strong-arming is his muscle Steak (the film’s director, Ray Dennis Steckler, under the pseudonym Cash Flagg), who gives Vickie the brush off, leaving Bud to fend for himself alone in the shark-filled waters of music stardom.

Wild Guitar is full of the music of Arch Hall, Jr., and tries its best to convince you that Hall is going to be a pop idol any day now. But the idea that Junior was going to join the charts in ‘62 with the likes of the Isley Brothers, Dion, and the Four Seasons was ludicrous at best, and Wild Guitar does nothing to dispel that fact. Honestly, it only confirms it.

Even the movie itself buckles under the pressure and launches into a kidnapping plot engineered by three lunkheads acting as comedy relief, with gags that would have drawn groans even decades earlier. Still, they do keep Bud from singing for a few minutes, so we should be grateful for small favors.

Wild Guitar feels flatter than it should, probably because it lacks the amateurish yet unique style of Eegah! Honestly, this would have been a far better flick had there been a giant caveman chasing around after Bud. Heck, based on my own musical experience, Eegah could have been banging away on the drums and no one would have batted an eye.

*And I plan on getting back to the Swingin’ Seventies just as soon as I can find my ‘70s movie lists that mysteriously “disappeared” right off of my desk. I should probably put the titles into a database instead of scribbling them down on the backs of Burger King receipts and in the margins of old Spider-Man comics.**

**OK, I see it now. The lists looked like trash and got thrown out by Mutant Janitorial, didn’t they?

Intermission!

• Posing in front of Dean Marin’s own Dino’s Lodge. That’s the biggest star power in this movie.
• Coffee and a doughnut for 15 cents! 1962, everyone.
• The figure skating scene is in the movie due to co-star Nancy Czar’s previous career as a championship skater. She later went on to be a skating coach in South Korea.
• The comedy bits by the three would-be kidnappers are weird, like they were lifted out of a ‘30s poverty row quickie and inserted into this film thirty years later.
• Some of the sudden zoom closeups here are more frightening than anything you would have seen in a horror flick of the day.
• And now for a badly choreographed fight scene. Bud’s gonna put some sauce on that Steak!
• Plot resolved. Time to leave this movie behind me.
• Oh, wait. Not yet. First I have to sit through a 1962 Arch Hall, Jr. music video. Look, knock Ed Wood all you want but he never made us sit through one of these.
• Not content to slip into cinematic obscurity after Wild Guitar, Ray Dennis Steckler kept on directing low-budget titles like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. The latter film came out in 1979, so it’s probably on my movie list. Time to do some dumpster diving.