"The crazed love of a prehistoric giant for a ravishing teenage girl" EEGAH comes to Blu-ray in a 4K restoration courtesy of The Film Detective!

Palm Desert society girl Roxy (Marilyn Manning, WHAT'S UP FRONT?), daughter of adventure novelist Robert I. Miller ("William Watters" aka Arch Hall Sr.), arranges to meet her gas station attendant boyfriend/country club crooner Tom (Arch Hall Jr., WILD GUITAR) in the desert for some late night necking. Driving through the dark within the vicinity of Shadow Mountain, Roxy nearly plows into a seven foot tall "giant" (Richard Kiel, MOONRAKER). When no one but her father believes her, Tom suggests that they drive into the desert and look for clues where they come across a set of giant footprint that leads them to Shadow Mountain. Miller decides to do some investigation himself, helicoptering into the canyon with instructions to be picked up the next morning. When the pilot cannot make the return trip, Tom and Roxy take his dune buggy into the canyon and become worried when all they find is Miller's smashed camera. While Tom searched for signs of his girlfriend's father, Roxy is abducted by the giant who brings her back to his cave where she and her wounded father surmise that the giant is the last of a family of cavemen whose lives had been extended by something in the sulfurous water that pours into a spring in the cave. Barely able to communicate with the giant, who they believe is named Eegah since that is the only word he repeats often, Miller and Roxy decide they must distract him using Roxy's sex appeal in order to escape. That approach works only too well as Eegah follows Roxy, Miller, and Tom tracking the scent left on her scarf back to civilization for the tragic conclusion.

Lampooned by MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, Elvira, and Svengoolie, EEGAH is fully deserving of such mockery not for the ambitions of its makers – a star vehicle for actor/singer Hall Jr. in which he is literally and figuratively overshadowed by Kiel – but for the schizoid approach that is too earnest to be parody but often more hilarious funny when it is trying to be dramatic than when it tries to be funny. Hall Jr. gets so many musical numbers in the film that one wonders why Roxy has not bludgeoned him over the head for singing above every other girl but her, and his voice really carries in the desert along with the phantom acoustic instruments that accompany his guitar strumming. Beehive-haired Manning makes for an amusing heroine, but her nasal voice is even more grating than that of the publisher's wife in I EAT YOUR SKIN. Kiel manages against odds to evoke sympathy in absurd situations, and one wonders if DEATH LINE's Gary Sherman might have seen the film as there is a similar attempt at pathos for the "monster" as we are shown his world in which he is surrounded by his dead relatives with which he still holds involved conversations. Shot on a low budget with the apparent heavy involvement of Palm Desert businesses and residents as extras, EEGAH actually is kind of impressive as an independent production from a time just before Herschell Gordon Lewis would throw gore into the formula. Hall Jr. would get more of a showcase as THE SADIST the following year.

Self-distributed by Hall Sr. in a double bill with the previous year's THE CHOPPERS, including a traveling roadshow with Hall Jr. singing around the snack shack and Kiel terrorizing the audience, EEGAH hit home video in 1985 through Rhino Home Video who reissued it later with Elvira hostess segments (she would host it again for her short-lived 2010 late night show run of films for which Viacom had the TV rights), and again on VHS when they had the rights to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Although EEGAH on DVD was ubiquitous on public domain labels, the only "legit" version was Rhino's Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD edition which had the original version as an "unmasked" extra (the MST3K version would be released on DVD again when Shout! Factory got the rights to the show). The unofficial Blu-ray debut was on fce's pathetic ATTACK OF THE B's single-disc set of eighteen movies all in 480i.

The Film Detective has had a hit-and-miss track record with their remastered DVD, DVD-Rs, and BD-Rs, but the pressed Blu-ray of EEGAH is derived from a 4K restoration of the original 35mm camera negative provided by Something Weird Video with some involvement from Shout! Factory as well (more on that below). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 pillarboxed widescreen transfer at its best looks like it was shot yesterday with striking clarity and vivid hues (the gel lighting during the macabre title sequence brings to mind the American titles sequence for Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE done on the cheap). At its worst, the transfer has some jittery shot splices, rare scratches, but generally the enhanced resolution exposes the rough edges of the production like some lagging or drifting focus in the night shots and some shots of deadly desert wildlife that were obviously not shot by a nature photographer but with a telephoto lens. Close-ups of Kiel hilariously reveal his shaggy caveman hair to be stylishly coiffed and shiny while Hall Jr.'s gelled do looks like bedhead in comparison. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is very clean, exposing the looping of dialogue that varies from simply lacking room tone to sounding like it was coming out of a drive-in speaker (although this is not evidence of patching up a damaged track since the music and effects sound otherwise normal). Optional English SDH subtitles are provided, and indeed they cover all of the extras as well.