GamerTab
That was an excellent one.
Philippa
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
Woodyanders
Five delinquent adolescents known collectively as "the Choppers" terrorize the countryside by stripping cars left by the side of the road with ruthless efficiency. The laughably clueless local yokel cops bumble, fumble and stumble around in fruitless circles until the discovery of a lone chicken feather at a crime site (!) steers them in the right direction.Tautly directed by Leigh Jason, crisply shot in gorgeous black and white, further graced by hip slangy lingo ("square johns" for decent law-abiding citizens, "bandits" for the fuzz), groovy music (highly unlikely and sublimely geeky flash-in-the-pan wannabe teen scream idol Arch Hall, Jr. belts out a couple of endearingly goofy songs), solid acting, continuity errors aplenty, and snappy pacing, this funky little item sizes up as a good deal of trim, no-frills, mean'n'lean early 60's JD crime movie fun. Yummy blonde "Playboy" Playmate Marianne Gaba (Miss September '59) looks quite delectable in her tight sweater and form-fitting skirt. Rotund veteran sleaze film character actor Bruno Ve Sota has one of his best-ever roles as Moose, a greedy, grubby, no-count, cigar-chewing junkyard owner who fences stolen automobile parts on the side. Scrawny chopper Rex Holman also portrayed a member of the lethal highway gang in "Panic in Year Zero." Arch Hall, Sr., who both wrote and produced this picture, pops up in a sizable supporting part as a smooth-voiced radio reporter and does marvelously mellifluous vocal work on the film's nifty trailer. Moreover, this flick scores bonus points for depicting the choppers as toxic products of messed-up families: Musclehead Torch has a pathetic drunk for a dad, Holman was raised by an aunt and uncle after his original parents dumped him when he was just a baby, and cocky ringleader Hall, Jr. is a spoiled rotten rich brat who's hungry for kicks. Those fine folks at Something Weird Video offer this baby on a terrific DVD double bill with the equally excellent and entertaining Arch Hall, Jr. rock'n'roll star vehicle "Wild Guitar." Can you dig it, daddy-o? I sure can -- and certainly did.
shepardjessica-1
Not in the league of THE SADIST or WILD GUITAR, this early Arch Hall, Jr. flick is fun, b/w, and low. Love Moose, junkyard mogul (great caricature of him on the sign as well). Whatever these guys were thinking when they made this type of exploitation film is okay with me. The slang dialogue is flowing and plenty of cheeseburgers to go around.A 4 out of 10. Best performance = the guy who plays Moose. This is on DVD with WILD GUITAR so check it out, daddy-o! Lame songs which are perfect, chicks just good-looking enough to seem like they'd be around these guys, and nice locale where they filmed it. Arch Hall, Sr. must have been a strange dude, bankrolling his kid's career this way, but what the hey!
frankfob
. . . which isn't saying much, as besides this and the excellent "The Sadist," Fairway's output was nothing but Grade-Z trash. There are several factors, however, that raise this a notch or two above the usual Fairway garbage. One is that director Leigh Jason makes this film look better and more professional than it deserves. Jason, a Hollywood veteran who had been directing since the 1930s, had obviously fallen on hard times if he was reduced to working for Fairway, but he still knew how to put a film together, something that Fairway never seemed to quite get the hang of. Another factor in the film's favor is leading lady Marianne Gaba. While she's no great shakes as an actress, she is nonetheless competent, and also drop-dead gorgeous (as one would expect a former Playboy Playmate to be) and a welcome relief from the embarrassing attempts at acting from most of the rest of the cast (one odd thing, though, is her "romance" with Tom Brown, who plays her boss. Brown, who had been an actor since the 1920s, has to be at least 25 years older than Gaba, and that kind of age difference was seldom, if ever, seen in Hollywood films until relatively recently). Veteran heavy Bruno VeSota is his usual enjoyable if somewhat hammy self as the crooked owner of a junkyard. Whatever pluses the film has, however, are more than outweighed by the laughable, self-consciously "hip" dialog by writer/producer Arch Hall Sr.--some of the "slang" he writes for the teenagers is out of the 1940s, not the 1960s--and the almost non-existent production values. Most of the film is shot outdoors and the few interior sets are threadbare in the extreme. The "rock n' roll" score is, as has been previously mentioned, perversely enjoyable in its awfulness. A few neat old cars--especially an absolutely gorgeous '59 Cadillac convertible that is seen in the very beginning of the film and never shown again and a very nice early '50s Kaiser that is, unfortunately, stripped to the bones and trashed--and the beautiful Gaba make this a film that you might want to see once, but that's about it.
Michael O'Keefe
This movie is so bad it is fun to watch. Typical story about teens gone bad. A group of young men, with nothing better to do, steal cars to strip for parts. Attempts to even rock 'n' roll falls laughingly flat. No stars, but participating in this mess are:Arch Hall Jr., Robert Paget, Bruno VeSota and Marianne Gaba.
