Give any neophyte (word of the week!) independent film director a camera and a small budget ($100,000 in this case) and they might well have come up with something like this. Has the feel of being an advert for promoters of LSD who felt they had to play fair and show the potential downside. Meanwhile, they can jam in an absolute phantasmagoria of imagery and sit back and wait for Stanley Kubrick to rip off some of their ideas and give the whole head-spinning malarkey some credence for the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If there’s a story, it’s as thin as they come. Commercials director Paul (Peter Fonda), trying to understand himself better, and why, for example, wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) has left him for another man, enlists the help of self-help guru John (Bruce) to guide him through an LSD trip. The notion that there are drug guides comes as a surprise to me, and this feels like the kind of the warning you get on the side of cigarette packets, although quite what guidance anyone can expect while under the influence is anybody’s guess. If you’re high as a kite, it’s unlikely you’re on an even enough keel to do what you’re told.
Anyway, off we go. And lo and behold, before you can utter the words “groovy” or even “psychedelic,” suddenly the screen is invaded with all sorts of images, coming so quick and fast that even the ones that might makes sense – i.e. indicating paranoia – get little time to settle before the next appear. Some of the images look like they’re offcuts from an AIP horror picture, haunted houses, medieval backdrops, torture, people being mummified or hanged or drowned or all three (maybe all at once).
And from there it’s an easy step into being dazzled by headlights or climbing a cliff or running through a desert or being chased by masked men on horseback and hearing high-pitched giggling. Some of the images, while dreamlike, remain realistic, such as topless body-painted go-go dancers. And the oddest image of a woman in curlers eating a chicken leg in a laundromat feels easily like something out of a bizarre dream when in fact it isn’t.
Some stuff you might expect. Items like an orange are experienced with more intensity. And Paul is disembodied when he observes people making love. Sometimes you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, other times it’s with grim clarity. Strobe lights, hallucination, add to the dreamy expressionistic quality. Not sure the movie had much to say except drugs can be fun – or not. But, inevitably, the imagery, instead of assisting with characterization, gets in its way.
Looks strange to see so many hippies with short hair. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson (here only in his capacity as the screenwriter) would come together with greater effect in Easy Rider (1969). This resembles nothing more than an audition for the later film but directed by someone (Hopper) with a bit more sense, adding a proper narrative and cutting the tripping down to the minimum.
Roger Corman (The Secret Invasion, 1964) directed but Susan Strasberg (The Sisters, 1969), Bruce Dern (Castle Keep, 1969) and Dennis Hopper have such small parts they are almost only there to add marquee value. Not quite the ode to counter culture envisaged.
Shows how difficult it is to film the unfilmable.
The Magnificent 60s 
Films about taking drugs always seems to me to be a dead end; we can’t experience whatever is going on, so we’re left watching gimmicky visuals or deadbeat actors. Don’t remember this film fondly at all.
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I had avoided it until now for the same reason.
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