I have to hold my hands up really; both with this one and with a few of my episodes that deal with older bad movies. One of my main sources for discovering older films like this is the TV show “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” (Often affectionately shortned to “MST3K”)
It was arguably one of the first shows to really bring the art and humour of bad films to a mainstream audience and I was VERY late to the party on this one. Y’see; MST wasnt really shown in the UK. it have a very very limited run of episodes on the sci-fi channel in the late 90s (Literally from what I’ve been able to research they showed about 1 season of Mike Era episodes over the course of about 5 months and that was it) I have very fleeting memories of seeing either some promotional material or a single episode of this run. And then the next time i’d encounter MST would be in my time in University where me and my friend Ben would devour 2 or 3 episodes a night for weeks at a time while drinking heavily and eating take away pizza…life was good!
Eegah is one of the few movies from MST that I have watched both riffed and unriffed and its delightfully watchable to me in either format (Though honestly the MST versions vastly superior and my preferred watching experience if I had to choose) It was featured in the last few years as an episode of there seasonal “Turkey Day” marathon on youtube (Which I highly reccommend you check out this thanskgiving!) and thats what put it to the forefront of my mind when it came to picking a movie to review.
It’s a very unusual movie with a fantastically craptacular ending but it has its own charm and I can see why MST3K decided to pick this one up. The jokes almost write themselves…