The following is my entry in The Pop Stars Moonlighting Blogathon, being hosted by Gill at the blog Realweegiemidget Reviews from March 12-14, 2020. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ takes on pop stars who decided to try movie acting as a second career!
With Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a splendid time is guaranteed for all…lovers of bad movies, that is. This movie was conceived at a time when wishful thinking about a Beatles reunion was at its peak, and when producer Robert Stigwood and stars The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton could seemingly do no wrong. So Stigwood snapped up the rights to classic Beatles tunes and, with the simple thinking that 3 + 1 = 4, he put Frampton and The Brothers Gibb together to make a quartet. The only problem was, that quartet wasn’t The Beatles.
The plot bears a vague similarity to the great Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine (and please, the resemblance ends there), by way of Sgt. Pepper’s band rescuing Frampton’s girlfriend (named Strawberry Fields in the movie…you know, “Strawberry Fields Forever”?) from some evildoers, particularly a ferocious band played by Aerosmith. But considering that Aerosmith does one of the few decent Beatles cover versions in the movie (“Come Together”), one would wish for Strawberry to come to her senses and become a groupie for the evil band.
But then, this wafer-thin plot is really only an excuse to gather an all-star cast (including Steve Martin, poor guy, in his feature-film debut) and make them warble half-baked versions of Beatles hits. The nadir is probably George Burns doing “Fixing a Hole” (in his throat, from the sound of it).
I suppose you can’t blame Stigwood, the Gibbs, et al. for trying to cash in on a craze. One person you can blame, though, is veteran Beatles producer George Martin, who inexplicably got involved in this mess as its music producer. At the time, Martin supposedly bragged that the soundtrack album shipped more units than the Beatles’ 1967 original album. But when the movie laid a giant egg in theaters across the country, most of those huge shipments were either sent back or were laid to rest in the $1.98 bargain bin. Since then, Martin, whose has appeared in many Beatles tributes (such as the Beatles Anthology video set), has been noticeably reticent about his contribution to this stinker.
As one critic put it at the time, if you listen to the soundtrack album backwards, you can hear Paul McCartney saying, “I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead!”
MovieMovieBlogBlog II 
Lol…so true, every word you’ve written. Your George Burns quip made me laugh out loud. But I own a copy of this very bad movie and have watched it many times, it’s a guilty pleasure that takes me back to my childhood. And you are right, “Come Together” is the best Beatles cover in the film!!
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Sgt. Pepper’s is exquisite fun. Sure, it’s lame-O with a capital O, but those of us (or am I in a minority of 1?) who like cheesy stuff with acting that is the enthusiastic equivalent of, say, Richard Burton as a Batman villain, this stuff is eminently watchable. Even if it’s only to laugh at Donald Pleasance as a leering fruitcake of a producer. I also think Aerosmith does a bang up job as Future Villain Band. By the way did you know KISS turned down being FVB to do “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park”? Imagine that… one clunker over another.
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Well, that certainly gave me a giggle this Sunday morning. Also, the idea that you can assemble all the talent available and still come up with a stinker.
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