Roadtrips

The exploitation-film producer Arch Hall Sr. thought his son might make a decent rock-and-roll star, so he cast Junior as a guitar-toting, bike-riding six-string rebel in such '60s teen fare as Wild Guitar. Sleepy LaBeef, on the other hand, picked himself up from Smackover, Arkansas, to become a regional rock-and-roll favorite, and though fame did not reward him as it did his pals George Jones, Roy Orbison, and Buddy Holly, Sleepy would go on to amass a repertoire of some 6000 songs and become known as one of the finer living repositories of American roots music. Although their paths never crossed, Sleepy and Arch Hall Jr. both wound up as celluloid monsters. Hall, who never made it in music, turned in his only memorable performance on film as the titlular psychopath in The Sadist (1963), where he was modeled loosely on real-life serial killer Charlie Starkweather. Sleepy once put down his real-life wild guitar in an attempt to break into the movies; he ended up as the Monster half of the grade-Z turkey The Monster and the Stripper, a film directed by the eccentric Ron Ormond, who later found Jesus and made a series of low-budget evangelical films that might be described as Christ-sploitation. In any case, The Sadist screens at midnight this Friday and Saturday at the Coolidge Corner (617-734-2500) in Brookline. (It's become a cult classic, thanks in part to its stark black-and-white photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, who later went on to shoot things like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Witches of Eastwick.) And after his monster one-shot, Sleepy went back to rocking-and-rolling, which he continues to do to this day. He lived in these parts for quite a stretch, so it's sorta like a homecoming whenever he rolls back through; he's at the Bull Run (978-425-4311) in Shirley this Saturday night and at Johnny D's (617-776-2004) in Somerville next Saturday, December 23.

The Pernice Brothers -- the pop-slanted outlet of former Scud Mountain Boy Joe Pernice, who's most noted for his lonesome alterna-country chops -- come out of hiding with shows on Friday at Flywheel (413-527-9800), 2 Holyoke Street in Easthampton, and Saturday at Lilli's (617-591-1661) in Somerville. And the "Irish Tenors Christmas Spectacular" features Anthony Kearns, Ronan Tynan, Finbar Wright, and a 60-piece orchestra on Tuesday at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium (978-937-8688).
-- Carly Carioli