What a hoot! Typical juvenile delinquency flick from the 1950s, "The Choppers" entertains as a campy and amusingly preachy movie about the horrors of teens gone bad. A pompous, middle-age "on the scene" reporter, played by Arch Hall, Sr., gushes in-your-face vigilance to parents, to keep their teen boys on the straight and narrow, lest they degenerate into hoodlums behind bars.Bad B&W lighting, bad sound, bad acting, cardboard sets, and film direction slightly better than Ed Wood convey the impression that almost anyone can make a movie, if they have about twenty bucks. And dig that dialogue, daddy-o, straight out of 1950s hips-ville.The "star" actor, Arch Hall, Jr. plays the leader of a gang of rowdies that steal parts off of abandoned cars. And at one point he sings a little tune called "Monkey In My Hatband", which is great in that the song helps distract us from the actual film.In the first five minutes, we get to see a 1959 Cadillac convertible, with those huge tail fins and sleek fender skirts ... what a boat! And as the "plot" moves along we learn that in those days, you could buy a taco or tamale for 15 cents.No, "The Choppers" is not a good movie. But it's kinda fun, if you watch it in the proper frame of mind. Viewers who pine for those awful 1950s drive-in flicks produced on a shoestring budget will find much to smile about with this one.

This is Arch Hall, Jr.'s first film and it's strange that although he appeared a year later in WILD GUITAR that he looked a lot younger and less polished in THE CHOPPERS. Not surprisingly, his father, schlock film maker Arch Hall, Sr. was also in the film in a bit part as a radio announcer decrying the sad plight of youth run wild. Leigh Jason directed this film with enough style and grace to make me almost think that Hall, Sr. had done so--in other words, he, too, was a hack.Despite the title, this film is NOT about motorcycles or helicopters but about youths who make money and get cheap thrills "chopping" cars. In other words, they strip cars illegally--selling the parts to an unscrupulous junkyard owner who resells them. The beginning appears to be narrated by Hall, Sr. and much of the film feels very stiff--like a much stiffer version of "Dragnet". The only performers who weren't stiff in their deliveries were the teens--who seemed like total stereotypes of the "youth gone wild" beatniks of the age. Also, I am pretty sure that at least one of the songs you hear in the background is one of Arch, Jr.'s--he sang in several of his films and I'd recognize that adequate voice anywhere.There were a few interesting quality touches in the film. One occurred at about the 47 minutes mark. As the truck was driving down the highway, you see the driver turning the wheel back and forth in the closeup--like he's turning the corner. But when the camera pulls back, you see the road is straight as an arrow for miles! Another was the great acting by the drunk dad near the end--a terrible performance that stood out way ahead of all the other poor performances! Overall, a bad film that is worth seeing for a laugh. In other words, bad movie fans will enjoy it immensely--others probably won't be so impressed.

For a movie that rhymes "Monkeys in my Hatband" with "I can do a handstand" for the lead character's big song, this movie was pretty good.It's a movie with a moral that if parents don't look out for their kids they will start stealing car parts and shoot a bunch of cops. Does anybody know what he meant by "Monkeys in my hatband"?I don't get it. Perhaps watching this movie on the roof of a supermarket in center city Philadelphia made it a bit more entertaining.I hope that Arch Hall Jr. is one day recognized as the genius he is.

. . . 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.