"Thumb Tripping" (1972) d/ Quentin Masters

Here's a lost counterculture gem from the guy who would later bring you the Joan Collins-fest, The Stud (1978)(a cinematic streeetch for Joanie, it were, playing slappers n' all), about hitchhikin' hippies, such a popular exploitation film subject back in the seventies, i.e. The Hitchhikers (1972), Teenage Hitchhikers (1975), Hitch Hike to Hell (1977), and even Autostop rosso sangue (1977), whose U.S. release title was, of course,  Hitch Hike. Tonight's review borrows less from films of that ilk, though, and more from Joe(1970) or Easy Rider (1968), a non-judgmental time capsule of the era starring the likes of Meg Foster, Michael Burns, Marianna Hill, and, as you may have guessed from the interesting one sheet art above, the one and only Bruce Dern.


"Shoplifting turns me off, maaaaan.", exclaims Gary (Michael Burns) the good hippie.
After getting dumped in a more hippie conducive area for loitering on the Cali beach by the local fuzz, Gary (Michael Burns), a collegiate ride thumber on hippie-hiatus, meets Chay (Meg Foster), a party girl with eyes that could chill a glass of Kentucky bourbon, and they decide to hitch hike together, vowing to accept every possible ride along the way. Gary scolds Chay for shoplifting, and they eat bread in the grass together.  Smitty (Bruce Dern) and his aptly-monnikered driver, Simp (Larry Hankin), make them regret their promise early on, speeding recklessly along, hogging the road in their yellow hot rod, while Smitty rambles wild-eyed, playing with his switchblade. Things get worse when they're picked up by an angry, abusive mother (Joyce Van Patten) whose own teenage daughter flew the coop to Hippie-ville on her. They parts ways after Chay lays the moral skitz on her, and they're soon picked up by a bennie-popping trucker named Diesel (Michael Conrad) who offers Gary fifteen bucks to pop Chay in the slice, while she hippie-grooves by the jukebox, turned on by the older guy's grasp on life, herself.


"You're in no position to laugh at my satin baseball jacket. I've got a switchblade, and I will use it. I will. I WILL."
Gary's objectification of Chay and phony moral high ground amount to naught in the end, as Diesel locks him in the back of the eighteen-wheeler over night, helplessly forced to squash leftover oranges in jealousy over the sounds of his "girlfriend" locating her G spot's twenty with her horny good buddy. After a brief spat, they're given a lift by a young married couple in a convertible, Jack (Burke Byrnes) being the obligatory testosterone-n-booze fueled working stiff, and Lynn (Marianna Hill), a bubbly, busty blonde who knows how to pass a fella a can of beer as he's speeding down the highway in broad daylight. As a result of their reckless only-in-the-seventies asphalt sauce up, the men swap partners while drunkenly cooling off in a lake. Too much vodka leads the girls to stumble into a bar packed with yokels, making an embarrassing spectacle of themselves and leading to their eventual violent "don'tcha come back now, y'hear?" expulsion from the establishment, after a jealous, juiced up Jack gets roughed up in the process. Gary drives them home, and the young hitchers adventure ends, as they part ways as friends.


"You kids ever drink vodka from the bottle while driving down the highway in a convertible in broad daylight before?"
Michael Burns enjoyed a long career of television roles, before and after this effort. Recently, Meg Foster showed up in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem (2012), a movie I have yet to see. Her eyes are unforgettable. Burke Byrnes later turned up in made-for-tv The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver (1977) and Prophecy (1979), and even later in Witchboard (1986) and Child's Play 3 (1991). Mike Conrad you may or may not remember as Sgt. Esterhaus on long running television series, Hill Street Blues, while Hill would later show up in genre efforts like Blood Beach (1980) and Schizoid (1980). If you can track down a copy, you'll appreciate it, especially for Dern's scene, another quality mental case performance to add to his resume. On the scale, Tripping scores a pair of Wops, worth a look.


Awwwww. What an adorable little freeloader.

"Schizoid" (1980) d/David Paulsen

Sorry about the delay between reviews lately, I'm sure you probably feel like that forgotten anole lizard in the barren aquarium in the corner of some irresponsible little bastard's bedroom by now, your sunken eyes frantically scanning the dirty glass for a mere wax worm or micro cricket worth of sustenance. Hang tight, my woprophiles, I've got an impressively opulent stack of genre movies we'll be looking at this month, and leading it all off, is a surprisingly engaging American pseudo-giallo disguised as typical slasher fare of the era (the one sheet is a dead giveaway, I dunno), that you might otherwise slag off if you're searching for the blade-generated tomato paste so often promised in knifer flicks. If you did that, you'd be missing out on a rare subdued Kinski (save for some creepy incestual tension in one spot), Marianna Hill, who you might remember in "High Plains Drifter" as Ghost Eastwood's objet d'viol, Donna (Jaws 2) Wilkes, Craig (Body Double) Wasson, and hell, throw Jim from Taxi in there, and slap a silly mustache on him, to boot. Let's roll...


"Uv corss I'm not vatching you get undresst. Don't be silly."
When Julie (Hill), a newspaper advice columnist who's going through a sensitive divorce with her sweaty husband (Wasson), starts receiving increasingly unnerving anonymous cut-n-paste letters with murder as the subject, it just so happens to coincide with a mounting body count; comprised mostly of her fellow therapy group members, all of whom seemingly had been secretly lovers of Pieter (Kinski), the therapist himself, before learning the fatal mistake of playing with a big-assed pair of scissors, or more importantly, playing with a shadowy figure in foppish hat and leather gloves that happens to be wielding said sizeable, sharpened snips.Whether Pieter is the culprit or not, he still manages to peep-tom his own daughter Alizzin,errr..Alison (Wilkes) in the buff to score magnificently on the creep-o-meter, regardless. But the creeps to choose from in this lousy burg are many, as we soon find out.


The Chooper got her, and we knew it.
Besides the polyamorous shrink (who's also taken to having his sexual way wiss,errr...with Julie by now) and Julie's clammy ex, there's Gilbert the lonely maintenance man (Lloyd), there's the boys in blue who treat the psychotic letters like a big joke(, and little Alizzin, err...Allison's not without suspicion herself, with that incendiary jealousy of Julie, and the drawer full of cut-out letters, and all. When Julie finds out it's Pieter's daughter behind the letters, she draws her out into a gun-frontation with her husband and the therapist, who's soon on the scene. It was the sweat-drenched Doug, afterall, who kidnaps Allison and Julie (who hates hairbrushes, apparently) and duels with Pieter in the dark (you haven't lived until you've seen a hammer-wielding Kinski square off against Wasson) until an untied Allie plunges his own trademark scissors into his back as he's beating the therapist and accusing him of stealing his wife, and, of being a nazi, as well. You're thinking of Eroi all'inferno (1974), Craig...err, Doug. As Doug slumps lifelessly over a piece of overturned furniture, the cops finally come in.


"Zose frozen peas in zere are turnink me on, baby..."
After completing Savage Weekend(1979) and tonight's review, Paulsen went on to direct episodes of Dallas, Dynasty, and even Knots Landing, ferchrissakes. Though Schizoid might be a little too dry for the modern slasher crowd, especially those of the 80's camp, fans of Kinski will do well to add this one to their "to see" queue's in the near future. It's nothing too exceptional, but highly watchable, anyway. Two big ones.


"Playing Twister at her age, she shoulda known better..."

"The Baby"(1973)d/Ted Post

I recall seing tonight's review a handful of times during my childhood; it used to be you could catch a viewing of it every so often on late night television during the seventies, before it vanished altogether(Image put out a bare bones disc in 2000, made obsolete by a special edition from the folks at Severin Films that boasts of a new transfer from the original negative and even the original trailer, scheduled for release this year) for ages.When I picked up the Image disc years back, I revisited the movie for kicks, and though it's mostly drab and awful, packed with psychedelic, gaudy filler party footage that goes on forever, offset by Marianna Hill's highrise hairdo that seems to grow with every scene and Ruth Roman's Crawford-esque turn as Mrs. Wadsworth, Baby's mother, there's a real twisted tale behind it all that will have unadulterated sex with your grey matter long after the tv's been shut off... if you can stay awake long enough to wait for it, that is.I'd imagine this'd make pretty epic viewing in spots if you happened to be in an altered state of some sort.Not sayin' bath salts or anything drastic like that, maybe just a fattie bowl of sticky buds over a painkiller cocktail.Y'know, the very lightest expansion of your horizons.Even straight up with no chaser, this one is strange like that Ichabod Crane lookalike with Bryan Adams' complexion that taught you foreign languages in college out of a metal attache' case.You know there weren't any notes or prototype tests in that blasted thing, just his own mother's mummified heart with a bite out of it or something.Strange.Just like this movie.

Marianna Hill proves adept at puddin' spoonin' with a smile.Her hair gives me vertigo.
The Wadsworth family is about to screen another social worker, Ann Gentry(Anjanette Comer), a lonely woman in the throes of deep depression following a car accident she was in.The Wadsworths are comprised of Mater Dubya(Ruth Roman),her two creepy daughters, Alba and Germaine(Susanne Zenor,Marianna Hill),and Baby(David Manzy),a twenty-one year old gent decked out in baby clothes and diapers, who sleeps in a crib.Ann doesn't seem to have a problem with this picture, doting over the man, speaking babytalk, and telling him just how cute he looks, when in actuality, he rolls around like a disturbed basset hound that's just eaten an ounce of shrooms, over a seemingly endless piped in track of babies gurgling and crying(!).Mrs. W is a harsh dame indeed, rougher than P12 sandpaper, and when Ann starts putting in volunteer o.t. in caring for Baby, she starts to grow suspicious of her.Ann, no stranger to mental illness herself, walks the tightrope of shithouse rat craziness and secrecy, living in a sizeable domicile with her mother-in-law and possessing of an exquisite wardrobe...all on a social worker's salary?Hmmm.Her husband is m.i.a., and Ann seems indecisive about whether he's alive or dead, telling different stories to different people and sobbing with her mother over vacation slides.Meanwhile, the Wadsworths come home from an evening out to find a flabbergasted flamehead babysitter with her freckled tit in Baby's mouth.She gets the packing peanuts whipped out of her with a beltbuckle for her horny troubles.You see,Baby is his own family's imprisoned object d'sex(!!), as we see Germaine shedding gear in the middle of the night and climbing into Baby's crib.That is, when he isn't being shock-tortured with a cattle prod(!!!),"Baby doesn't talk!" Bzzzzt."Baby doesn't walk!" Bzzzt."EVERRRR!!!" Bzzzt.Bzzzt.

In Baby, bawdy Bonnie Franklin lookalikes bare their bobblers to be orally bankrupted by bent baby-men.
Whenn Ann starts throwing around the idea of putting Baby into a special school where he might, you know...develop past the infancy stage, an enfuriated Mrs. W gives Ann the bootskis, calling her superiors and getting her removed from the case.Not to be outdone, Ann starts using the L word(hint: it ends in awyer)in rescuing Baby, his mother changes her tune, inviting the woman to Baby's upcoming groovy birthday party.Germain and Alba manage to slip the interloper a mickey amidst the loud seventies fashions, pot smoke, and chicken dancing to outta sight tuneage(there's a lot of this turning up in the reviews lately, I may have to investigate the phenomenon...nah.), leaving the hogtied, unconscious quidnunc in the basement.More resilient than a chameleon's ass cheeks, Ann slips out of her bindings, gaffles up Baby, and splits back to her mansion.When the Wadsworth women inevitably break into the estate to try and ninja back their oaf, Ann and her mother-in-law are already waiting to serve up some funky death to the trespassers.Jermaine receives a Columbian necktie, Alba takes a shiv to the back, and Mrs. W gets shoved over the staircase bannister, effectively breaking both of her legs, but that doesn't spare her a plot in the makeshift mass grave they've dug in the backyard; she gets buried alive.In what can be argued is the "Holy fuuuuuuuck!" finale of the seventies(it's up there, for sure), we finally see why Ann was so interested in Baby in the first place.Baby serves as a playmate for Ann's husband, rendered a waterhead through brain injuries in the aforementioned car accident.Credits!

It's not all titties and bouncy ball for Baby(David Manzy), check out that gear he's forced to rock.
Director Post, who helmed an assload of television in the fifties and sixties, also directed popular Clint Eastwood vehicles, Hang 'em High(1968) and Magnum Force(1973), as well The Harrad Experiment(1973).Anjanette Comer is probably most well known by fans for her work in the Spanish genre flick, Night of 1,000 Cats(1972) and the tv anthology, Dead of Night(1977).Marianna Hill you'll remember from her work in Messiah of Evil(1973),Blood Beach(1980), and/or Schizoid(1980), though High Plains Drifter(also 1973,busy year for this chick,eh?)deserves a mention as well.Ruth Roman should be familiar enough to woprophiles for her work in Grefe's Impulse(1974), Girdler's Day of the Animals(1977), and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train(1951).About Baby, sure the dated party sequence is paced terribly, making the entire effort a bit slow,but it's definitely worth a view just for the bizarre subject matter and plot twists therein, if not only for the crazy-assed ending.Two solid big ones.

Since car accident, Ann's husband sorts glass.Round ones here, square ones here.