Here's something interesting.
Superficially, it is just another cheapo late sixties boob exploitation flick.
But there are three reasons to sit through this.
First is the mildly interesting fact that this was the last movie that Gary Graver worked on before tying up with Orson Welles for Welles' most ambitious and now lost, project.
But the most interesting is the construction of the thing. So many of these were intelligently framed. You decide:
We meet a man on the street who has just taken drugs. He gazes into a shop window and the statues of nude women become real. He then wanders down the street and into a movie theater. He watches first a feature on a nudist camp standard fare in those days. Then begins a second movie whose titles are presented the same way as the one WE are watching. Every few minutes we shift from this movie within to the guy in the theater, just watching.
Okay, the movie within is of a fellow knocked cold by an automobile accident caused by our Wanda, an ultratall woman who is the leader of a gang of women hedonists. She takes our hapless Sylvester to her home, where he is whipped, bound, screwed and ultimately hypnotized.
Meanwhile, a sex maniac has escaped from the local "funny farm." The radio warns us that he is a sex-crazed maniac who (the radio tells us) goes berserk with drugs. This fellow wearing a coat that says "State Fun-ee Farm" shows up at Wanda's, where else? He seems to be the same guy watching in the theater, who, I think is the writer/director.
Hmm, starts to get interesting. He invades, whipping the girls and holding them at gunpoint. Sex, naturally. He frees the captive driver and together the two men find the LSD a bottle marked "LSD" in inch high letters. Everyone takes it and what they see is the last 15 minutes but five.
The maniac is then returned to the loony bin, the motorist (Sylvester, hypnotized into forgetting) is returned to his repaired Buick. Our moviegoer leaves the theater, enters his car, runs over nails set by Wanda and is kidnapped like Sylvester was.
In all this, it is ambiguous whether what we see is an ordinary movie, the movie within, the moviegoer's drug vision, or that of Sylvester, or (strong hints here) we have all been hypnotized by Wanda.
Finally, the importance of the film if you follow these things is in the acid vision itself. There's now a long tradition of this, filming transcendental vision. The same techniques are used whether psychotropic or math or mad dreams, but this was early in its invention. It was after "Alice in Acidland" and "2001" and before "Behind the Green Door," which was explicitly drug/sexy.
Body paint, sitar music, peace symbols, faces through a bubbling fishtank. wildly undulating nude girls, wobbly camera.
And what you'll find now in "Pi" and "Batman Begins."
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Superficially, it is just another cheapo late sixties boob exploitation flick.
But there are three reasons to sit through this.
First is the mildly interesting fact that this was the last movie that Gary Graver worked on before tying up with Orson Welles for Welles' most ambitious and now lost, project.
But the most interesting is the construction of the thing. So many of these were intelligently framed. You decide:
We meet a man on the street who has just taken drugs. He gazes into a shop window and the statues of nude women become real. He then wanders down the street and into a movie theater. He watches first a feature on a nudist camp standard fare in those days. Then begins a second movie whose titles are presented the same way as the one WE are watching. Every few minutes we shift from this movie within to the guy in the theater, just watching.
Okay, the movie within is of a fellow knocked cold by an automobile accident caused by our Wanda, an ultratall woman who is the leader of a gang of women hedonists. She takes our hapless Sylvester to her home, where he is whipped, bound, screwed and ultimately hypnotized.
Meanwhile, a sex maniac has escaped from the local "funny farm." The radio warns us that he is a sex-crazed maniac who (the radio tells us) goes berserk with drugs. This fellow wearing a coat that says "State Fun-ee Farm" shows up at Wanda's, where else? He seems to be the same guy watching in the theater, who, I think is the writer/director.
Hmm, starts to get interesting. He invades, whipping the girls and holding them at gunpoint. Sex, naturally. He frees the captive driver and together the two men find the LSD a bottle marked "LSD" in inch high letters. Everyone takes it and what they see is the last 15 minutes but five.
The maniac is then returned to the loony bin, the motorist (Sylvester, hypnotized into forgetting) is returned to his repaired Buick. Our moviegoer leaves the theater, enters his car, runs over nails set by Wanda and is kidnapped like Sylvester was.
In all this, it is ambiguous whether what we see is an ordinary movie, the movie within, the moviegoer's drug vision, or that of Sylvester, or (strong hints here) we have all been hypnotized by Wanda.
Finally, the importance of the film if you follow these things is in the acid vision itself. There's now a long tradition of this, filming transcendental vision. The same techniques are used whether psychotropic or math or mad dreams, but this was early in its invention. It was after "Alice in Acidland" and "2001" and before "Behind the Green Door," which was explicitly drug/sexy.
Body paint, sitar music, peace symbols, faces through a bubbling fishtank. wildly undulating nude girls, wobbly camera.
And what you'll find now in "Pi" and "Batman Begins."
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
