Big Rock Beat: A Wacky Zany Romp

Ex-rocker and current L.A. deejay Kihn brings back the resourceful hero of Horror Show for another goofily entertaining movie-and-rock romp, this one set in 1967. B-movie director Landis Woodley hasn't made a picture in 10 years when Sol Kravitz hires him to direct a dubious low-budget rock-and-roll flick--beach bunnies, racing cars, drugs, monsters. Landis's cousin, Beau, lead guitarist with a San Francisco band bumming around L.A., is swept into the movie, as are an uptight, ambitious young actress, an aging cheesecake starlet and a drug-soaked Bela Lugosi look-alike. Financing difficulties develop between Sol and investor Ernie Shakleford, owner of Shang-a-Lang Records, which drive Sol and Landis into the lethal embrace of Hector Diablo, a handsome devil who makes macabre conditions on his loan to bail out the production, now shooting. Landis and Sol are forced to take on his sinister nephew Johnny Immaculata as a producer, and to use James Dean's ""death car"" (reconstructed) in the movie. But there's worse to come. Sol is the first man murdered as the plot twists and loops around the wacky denizens of Kihn's Hollywood--many of whom survive the curse, and two of whom (the epilogue hints) will return in a sequel to this giddy exercise in pulp fiction. (Oct.)