Image courtesy of Bee Gees & Brothers Gibb Fan Club

Today would have been the 50th birthday of Andy Gibb,youngest of the Gibb Brothers of Bee Gees fame.

Image courtesy of Bee Gees & Brothers Gibb Fan Club

Happy Birthday, Andy!

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and there are movies that can only be described as “So Bad It’s Good“. And then there are movies that are so bad that they are, well, really bad. The 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band falls into that latter category.

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I didn’t know too much about the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie prior to watching it. All I knew is that it featured Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees in a tribute to the 1967 Beatles album of the same name. That sounded promising. I like the Beatles. I like the seventies. What’s not to like?

As it turns out, quite a lot. I’m not a big fan of musicals, and this movie is better described as a musical set to a series of Beatles cover songs. Except for the narration by George Burns (who also sings a version of the Beatles songs “I’m Fixing a Hole”), there is pretty much no dialog in the entire film. The story is told via a rapid succession of Beatles songs, which are strung together in a failed attempt create a cohesive narrative.

The “plot” of the movie follows three brothers (played by the Bee Gees) and their best friend, Billy Shears (Peter Frampton), who form the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in the sleepy town of Heartland. One day the band is discovered by a record company in L.A., and they are whisked off to the big city in a hot air balloon to seek their fame and fortune. Meanwhile, the nefarious Mean Mr. Mustard wreaks havoc back home and makes off with the band’s legendary instruments. Upon hearing of the town’s demise by Billy’s lovesick girlfriend (surprise! her name is Strawberry Fields), the band members embark on a mission to retrieve their missing instruments and return order to Heartland.

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But wait - there’s more! The movie also features cameos a’plenty, including appearances by Steve Martin as Dr. Maxwell Edison (complete with a silver hammer), Alice Cooper as Reverend Sun, Aerosmith as the Future Villain Band, Billy Preston as Sgt. Pepper, and Earth Wind and Fire as… Earth Wind and Fire. With all this super seventies star power, it’s hard to imagine a movie could go wrong. But, as I have learned from the Star Wars Holiday Special, cameos from famous stars do not necessarily a good movie make.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is so bad that it is listed as #76 in VH1’s 100 Greatest Shocking Moments in Rock & Roll. I have a pretty high tolerance for bad campy movies (Xanadu, anyone?) but even I had a hard getting all the way through this one.