Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

In another case of curiosity getting the better of me, I recently decided to watch the 1978 calamity, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This movie is notoriously bad, but I kinda felt the need to check it out on a sort of "just how bad?" Mystery Science Theater 3000-ish sort of level.

On the off chance you haven't heard of this film, it's a strange attempt to create a musical using the songs of the Beatles... but 25 years before someone decided to try it again in Across the Universe. And with vastly more camp potential, given the cast. Peter Frampton stars as Billy Shears, and his Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Bee Gees. Add in appearances from musical acts and artists like Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and Earth Wind & Fire, and actors with varied musical talent like George Burns, Donald Pleasance, and Steve Martin, and the result is an "am I really seeing this?" concoction of insanity.

Believe it, this movie is absolutely as terrible as you've heard, and worse than you'd imagine. Rating it solely on the merits of the film, there's no way to not call it an F. Terrible plot, terrible acting, terrible production values, and mostly terrible renditions of Beatles songs. (I say mostly, because even the ones that "aren't that bad," such as most of the material performed by the Bee Gees, just leave you thinking, "okay, that didn't suck, but wouldn't you just rather listen to the Beatles version instead?")

But the thing is, the movie does indeed reach that campy nirvana where it pushes through the other side of being awful and starts to be mildly entertaining again. Watching George Burns perform Fixing a Hole with two kids under age 10 as his backup dancers, I just couldn't help but laugh. Watching Alice Cooper do a William Shatner-esque spoken version of Because, with visuals that were almost certainly the inspiration for the Mugato brainwashing video in Zoolander, I was dumbstruck, wondering what possibly could have possessed anyone involved to become involved.

And then there's the number that I think probably everyone should see, even if you don't watch anything else from the movie: Steve Martin's version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer. It's un-frakkin'-believable. On one level, you're sort of getting an 8-year sneak peek on the brilliant work he'd do as the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. That's assuming you're not distracted by the dancers (female and male) convulsing around in summer UPS uniforms that look about two sizes too small. Or assuming you can even remember anything else when Steve Martin starts having an electrical sword fight with Peter Frampton. (You can almost hear the producers off-camera shouting, "that Star Wars movie was huge last year; we gotta get us some of that!") I've seen it, and I still don't believe it.

So I think I'd actually call the movie a D-, just starting to pull through to the other side of "so bad, it's good." That said, if you're ever inclined to watch it, do not waste your time by doing it alone. Gather a bunch of your quick witted friends together (I can't decide whether liking Beatles music is a plus or a minus here), and watch/mock it together. Or if you don't have enough clever friends willing to be suckered into it, maybe check out the RiffTrax take on it. (Well, not officially by the RiffTrax guys, but it might be good. I wish I'd known about that beforehand, though -- I'm not going to watch the movie again any time soon!)