Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Memories of older films tend to warp and wobble over the years.....
In revisiting them, sometimes they disappoint you in how clumsy, slow, out-of-touch and poorly made they now seem.
Sometimes they surprise you in how fresh, relevant and cutting edge they appear, now more than ever.
Do the ones everyone judged as rotten improve with the passage of time? Always a possibility. Remember, for example, John Carpenter's remake of 'The Thing'. Reviled in 1982 and now considered an all-time revered and still watched classic of horror and sci-fi.
Which brings us to this movie, which opened in the summer of 1978 to lethal reviews, audience derision and deep embarrassment and shame for everyone who worked on it.
We couldn't help wanting to find out.......47 years later, is it still as terrible as everyone remembers it? Or did it improve any?
Quick answer: No. If anything, it appears even more rotten, stupid and amateurish than when it first infected movies theaters...(which in those days, were mostly once large theaters sliced into twin cinemas, where you could easily hear the sound of whatever film was playing in the theater right next door.
Based on a 'jukebox musical' play and produced by mega-music impresario Robert Stigwood, the film strung a collection of Beatles songs around a cartoon-ish storyline straight out of a Saturday morning kids TV show.
Stigwood top-loaded the film with the oddest collection of cameo appearances ever assembled for one movie......everyone from then 82 year old George Burns to Aerosmith and Earth, Wind and Fire.
The lead roles, if you can call them that, fell to rocker-of-the-hour Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees.......(who immediately recognized the catastrophe they found themselves in, trying to exit the film after only two weeks into production.
As the title band, Frampton and Bee Gees try to carry on their mission to spread joy and love throughout the world, but they're thwarted and sabotaged by a variety of comic book villains. These include comedian Frankie Howard as Mean Mr. Mustard and Steve Martin as Dr. Maxwell Edison....(yes, the guy with his bang-bang Silver Hammer. )
George Burns has to narrate the loony storyline since the film itself attempts no spoken dialogue. Just the Lennon-McCarthy songbook here for the rest of the cast, whose performances vary from barely acceptable to mediocre to Karaoke From Hell.
The musical staging makes a gasping effort to emulate the bonkers spectacle that notorious wild man director Ken Russell brought to films (particularly in his version of 'Tommy'). And we could see and feel the obvious pain of Frampton and Bee Gees as they're forced to mug and grimace like silent film comedians. Charlie Chaplins, they ain't.
Need we go on? All these years later, we found the film to be an unwatchable torture to suffer through. As the Pepper band plays their big finale, Robert Stigwood gives them a crowd made of up of every celebrity of the era he could coerce into showing up. Oh joy, like that makes it all worth enduring the numbing, dumbing down experience of the film itself.
A film to be buried deep and stay forgotten for an eternity.....a bona fide BQ.....AFH. (Abomination From Hell).
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