Head movie review & film summary (1968)

The Monkees themselves are a harmless lot, little pop-idol puppies who can't sing, can't dance, can't talk, don't need to. The movie fits them into a plot somehow reminiscent of "A Hard Day's Night" and then forgets them. They themselves admit, at the film's beginning, that they're a "manufactured image," and the film tries to dismantle and discredit the image. Sometimes it succeeds.

But the Monkees, dismantled or not, aren't really at the heart of the film, and their songs are so forgettable that you have trouble remembering how they began, before they end. The film's success is in a series of satires on movie clichés, and in several blackouts. These are probably Nicholson's, and worth seeing.

We get the destruction of a Coke machine, a montage of three stereotyped desert scenes, a Western shoot-out with fake arrows, a Hollywood soda fountain brawl, things like that. They're good, and the rest of the movie (including trick photography that already seems out of date) isn't unpleasant. And you may, for metaphysical private reasons of your own appreciate the scene where The Monkees play dandruff in Victor Mature's hair.

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