Review of Psych-Out

Psych-Out (1968)
6/10
Bad Trip Dude.
18 August 2005
(Minor Spoilers) Trveling to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco to find her hippie brother Steve, Bruce Dern, pretty but hard of hearing Jenny Davis, Susan Strasberg, get's hooked up with a number of local hippie musicians and an high hippie Guru. The Hippies soon get her addicted to their free love and drug lifestyle that in the end almost cost Jenny her life.

Not that hip with what's happening Jenny falls for smooth talking Stoney (Jack Nicholson) ,by reading his lips, and ends up being bedded down by him at his pad together with a number of his other girlfriends.

Turned on to dangerous hallucinogenic drugs not only by Stoney but hippie Guru Dave(Dean Stockwell) who thinks he's the real deal, when it come to the free-love hippie lifestyle, that his fellow hippie Stoney's isn't. Jenny's brother Steve it turns out is on the run from a gang of thugs who dislike his free-love philosophy. When Jenny and her hippie friends Ben & Elwood, Adam Roarke & Max Julien, together with Stoney go to the junkyard, where Steve had made his home away from home,their attacked by these goons who try to rape Jenny. In the end they gets their butts kicked in by the suddenly non-peaceful but hard hitting hippies.

The fact that Steve, and artist, has his masterpiece on display at the Warren Gellery ,where Stony & Co. are staying at, has him sneaks in at night in order to retrieve it. Confronted by Stoney Steve is told that his sister Jenny's looking for him.

Complety blowing his cover Steve's trapped in a burning building by the thugs who've been looking for him and ends up possibly killed. Were never really shown what happened to Steve much less told just why these thugs were so hateful to him. Since he was just one of thousands of hippies in the city who shared the same ideas that he did; so why did they single him out for special treatment? Jenny is later turned on by Dave, who should have know better, on acid that blows her mind and causes Jenny to drift out on the dangerous Golden Gate Bridge.

With Jenny staggering onto the bridge's roadway and about to be run down and killed by the oncoming traffic Dave, in a moment of redemption for what he did to her, heroically saved Jenny's life but at the cost of his own.

Pretty good film about the 1960's counter culture with guest appearances by the popular late 1960's musical groups "The Seeds" & "The Strawberry Alarm clock". With Jack Nicholson looking more like an extra from the Mel Gibson American Revolutionery epic "The Patriot" then a 1960's type hippie.
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