Being a drive-in flick is something that carries as much plot as an empty garbage can, something light and crude enough so that the boy watching with the girl in the car can be distracted enough to work his way up just a little more up her skirt. Certainly the atmosphere is encouraging: it's about two hippies who hitchhike and get picked up by another hippie driving a van to Talahassee (as we only know cause of the "plot device" of the guy-hippie's boss repeatedly calling on the mobile-phone) and then he gets somewhat intentionally stuck in the swamp. The rest of the movie contains flashbacks and sex scenes, and some moments where "dialog" takes place- in quotes for the fact that most of it is incredulous stuff that only passes once or twice as real conversation or thought.
Maybe I'm a little too hard on this though; Pick-up is, actually, a surprisingly engaging soft-core hippie-spoliation picture. A lot of it can be attributable to the director/photographer Bernard Hirschhenson, who took a look at the script and the producers and probably said, "Fine, I'll do it, but..." and the but turned into a quasi-documentary on the steamy, dark and nature-full quarters of the Florida swamps. Matter of fact, Florida is a kind of character here- in the Terence Malick kind of way- this in spite the fact that the director sometimes goes to lengths to exploit the locations as much as the copulating actors. In many of these scenes- including the first one when Chuck and, uh, the girl who's more happy-go-lucky and sexually liberated walk away from the mobile and just walk in a drug-fueled daze in the swamp- the camera takes on a quality that almost, just almost, makes it captivating.
But then the "plot" has to come back into play, which is close to non-existent except for the whole facet of tarot cards and astrology and sexual abuse working its way into one of the female characters (the one with the dark hair and glazed look, Carol I think), and it starts to really get dull fast. How dull is accentuated by what is at first interesting in that Zardoz kind of manner and then devolves into the bad film-school thing of "depth" coming from an alter and religious and political symbolism (yes, political, there's an excruciating scene where a gay senator comes to call at the bus to get votes), and it reminded me of the "film" being directed by Howard Stern when he was at college in Private Parts.
So much of this is so dumb and going-nowhere storytelling and plodding around I should say it's a bad movie... and yet I can't really. I didn't want to turn it off because of something that could happen, or might happen with these freaky-deaky hippies (the women, I might add, quite the striking-looking types), and the cinematography is far beyond the call of anything else of its kind. Maybe not Russ Meyer, but it'll do. And, hell help me, there's some moments of real trashy fun amid the muck of 'whatever/sex/drugs'-ness on the whole.
Maybe I'm a little too hard on this though; Pick-up is, actually, a surprisingly engaging soft-core hippie-spoliation picture. A lot of it can be attributable to the director/photographer Bernard Hirschhenson, who took a look at the script and the producers and probably said, "Fine, I'll do it, but..." and the but turned into a quasi-documentary on the steamy, dark and nature-full quarters of the Florida swamps. Matter of fact, Florida is a kind of character here- in the Terence Malick kind of way- this in spite the fact that the director sometimes goes to lengths to exploit the locations as much as the copulating actors. In many of these scenes- including the first one when Chuck and, uh, the girl who's more happy-go-lucky and sexually liberated walk away from the mobile and just walk in a drug-fueled daze in the swamp- the camera takes on a quality that almost, just almost, makes it captivating.
But then the "plot" has to come back into play, which is close to non-existent except for the whole facet of tarot cards and astrology and sexual abuse working its way into one of the female characters (the one with the dark hair and glazed look, Carol I think), and it starts to really get dull fast. How dull is accentuated by what is at first interesting in that Zardoz kind of manner and then devolves into the bad film-school thing of "depth" coming from an alter and religious and political symbolism (yes, political, there's an excruciating scene where a gay senator comes to call at the bus to get votes), and it reminded me of the "film" being directed by Howard Stern when he was at college in Private Parts.
So much of this is so dumb and going-nowhere storytelling and plodding around I should say it's a bad movie... and yet I can't really. I didn't want to turn it off because of something that could happen, or might happen with these freaky-deaky hippies (the women, I might add, quite the striking-looking types), and the cinematography is far beyond the call of anything else of its kind. Maybe not Russ Meyer, but it'll do. And, hell help me, there's some moments of real trashy fun amid the muck of 'whatever/sex/drugs'-ness on the whole.