"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.

"Welcome to Arrow Beach" (1974) d/ Laurence Harvey

This lost seventies slasher/ "Psycho" clone would be the last movie appearance for former top shelf British actor Laurence Harvey, who also directed and allegedly edited  the picture from a phone on his death bed, as he lie dying of stomach cancer that would claim his life at forty-five, six months before the film saw an official release. It would be re-released two years later, under the title Tender Flesh, and the Magnetic Video VHS of the film interestingly stands as the second horror movie ever released on the then-virgin media format. Instead of Walter Pidgeon and Donna Reed co-starring as advertised (under the working title Yellow-Headed Summer, a year earlier),  the likes of Meg Foster, Stuart Whitman, John Ireland, and Joanna Pettet appear instead, to help Harvey complete his final, somewhat bloody cinematic vision.


"This your bag of shnoz rockets, pinko hippie?", ask the tolerant cops.
Robbin Stanley (Meg Foster) is a happenin' hippie hitchhiker making her way across California, who's latest ride is a coked-out charmer in a banana yellow Model A ("Nice mams!" is his opening line) who leads the police on a high-speed chase that ends in a construction zone crash. Despite their conservative drape leanings, the cops let her go, even after finding an eight ball of coke tucked away under the eight track player. She nonchalantly wanders from the crash site onto Arrow Beach, where she skinny dips under the watchful camera lens of one Jason Henry (Laurence Harvey), who lives in a nearby mansion with his sister, Grace (Joanna Pettet). Jason takes the stray in, amid jealous protest from his sister, feeds her a juicy steak*, and gives her hippie ass a much needed bubble bath. Though Robbin is grooving on Jason's wealth and seems receptive to the idea of giving him some poonany, he louses it up when his incessant late night whacking at slabs of human meat in the basement with an oversized cleaver sends the teenager, bloody and hysterical, screaming from the premises.


Spray that brush burn with some mercurochrome or it'll scar up on you...
With Robbin laid up in the hospital with an arm she injured while climbing out a basement window, Jason reports the incident to the police, destroying her credibility with some planted leftover anti-psychotics in her handbag from a flashback stint in Korean War that he survived through cannibalism. Grace, not only his loyal sibling but also his incestuous lover (like, bleeech, dudes), helps validate his story to Deputy Rakes (Stuart Whitman, who'd seemingly scored as many police roles as Claude Akins by this point), who naturally believes her, sending Robbin out of town on the first available bus, on the promise that she never return. Meanwhile, Jason takes in a weatherbeaten old hooker (burlesque star Gloria LeRoy) who'd been raped and jacked by a biker on the beach outside his mansion, and while snapping some profile shots of her, he introduces his sizable cleaver to the shoot, and makes a real mess of things. Robbin hitches a ride back to Arrow Beach, to the apartment of a young med tech named Alex (David Macklin), and they descend upon the very basement for proof of Jason's misdeeds that night...


Cleaver-hacked old hooker for dinner tonight, again?
When the movie was picked up from Warner Brothers by Brut (Thanks, Faberge'. I enjoy slasher movies and your shaving cream...), they excised nearly fifteen minutes from the print, and most of the cannibalism elements, though it's interesting to note that Tobe Hooper released his legendary cannibal epic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the same year. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, the loungey-sounding title track was crooned by none other than Lou Rawls (!), putting to rest the idea I used to have that he'd only had one song, "You're Gonna Miss My Lovin' ", that he sang repeatedly, for years and years. You live and learn, I guess. Beautiful Pa. native Meg Foster and her icy blue eyes would later turn up in things like John Carpenter's They Live(1988) and Niko Mastorakis' The Wind (1986). As it stands, there's no official dvd or Blu-ray release of this one yet, and there really ought to be, as it's a tense little blood-splashed thriller that merits a respectable deuce on the scale. Hunt a print down for yourselves.


"...What a horrible picture, man, he shoulda had his f-stop much lower...and just look at that light fall off..."
*probably not steak at all.

"The Wind"(1987)d/Nico Mastorakis

When last we examined one of Greek filmmaker Nico Mastorakis' movies nearly five hundred reviews ago(the very first post on Wopsploitation, some useless trivia for you there) back in ought-seven, naturally, it was his wildly controversial, widely banned 1975 pioneer effort, Island of Death that we scrutinized.Some five years later, we find another Mastorakis film to focus upon, this time, one of his low-budget American productions from the mid to late eighties, a direct-to-video cat n' mouse pot boiler set in Greece and starring a surprisingly good cast that includes Meg Foster, Robert Morley, Steve Railsback, David McCallum, and none other than Wings Hauser as the unhinged American psychopath.Sure, I just named the killer in the opening paragraph, but you're probably not gonna cast an apex antagonist like Hauser in your film as anything else but, really, are you.Besides, apart from a few moments of enveloping paranoia, Mastorakis, who wrote, produced, and directed here(as he often does), plays the whole thing decidedly straightforward and un-giallo, despite some mounting comparison of this particular work to Argento's over the years, crafting methodical suspense out of the isolation of his main character, and anthropomorphising the island's foreboding, seasonal night winds, instead.Despite the film's mostly lethargic pace and seeming aversion to the plot twists, gore, or nudity required of a slasher or giallo, Wind manages to weave some real tension and atmosphere around the lush cinematography and solid performances from it's two leads throughout.

"Would you mind terribly if I pulverized my poultry in the lavvy briefly?"
Sian Anderson(Meg Foster) is an American mystery novelist vacationing for several weeks in the remote Greek villa of Monemvassia, as rented to her by elderly-but-opinionated British chatterbox, Elias Appleby(Robert Morley), who tells her:"When I first saw this place, I nearly had an orgasm!", before warning her not to venture out in the brutal night winds, reminding her that she isn't in Chicago.While her overprotective beau, John(David McCallum), worries poolside(with a plexiglas window, no less) in America, the seasonal isolation allows for her to get to work on her latest novel, as she fleshes out an imagined argument between Appleby and his hired help, a gum-chewing American ne'er-do-well named Phil(Wings Hauser) who seems to appear and disappear with the sudden wind gusts, and who helpfully offers:"If you need to know about death, I'm right next door..."(!).Mighty neighborly of you, Phil.That night, she thinks she sees him burying a body out back, and after investigating further, discovers that the partially unearthed hand contains Elias' signature ring.While she struggles to determine whether the threat is real or imagined, and unable to maintain a phone connection long enough to relate her dilemma to her stateside lover(who can't get through to the Greek authorities on his end, either), she calls Elias' Greek wife with her suspicions, and when the woman comes looking for her husband in the blustery night, Phil feeds her sickle-fueled death, throwing her lifeless corpse into a pantry next to Elias, whose body he's moved to further complicate things.

Nevermind those limpid blue pools of hers, get a look at that delicious cigarette.
It isn't long before the peninsula's brutal winds usher in a prolonged game of cat and mouse between the homicidal handyman and the isolated writer, who barricades herself in, alternately pouring a pot of steaming hot water into his mush, stabbing his shoulder with a butcher knife, and repeatedly firing off a tactical shotgun in his general direction.John eventually gets through to the police, who send a landlocked sailor named Kesner(Steve Railsback) to check on Sian, but after much skepticism and precious little investigation, he's impaled through a door by Phil's sickle.Unwavered by his mounting injuries, Phil cracks a few poppers and harrasses the author with nursery rhymes and Humphrey Bogart impersonations over the phone, adding, matter-of-factly:"Do me a favor. Don't die quietly, okay. Talk to me." Sian boobytraps the door with some rope, and when Phil tries to break in, the door slams his sickle into his midsection, apparently killing him.As the writer tries desperately to flag down a couple of indecisive newlyweds outside the castle, Phil pops up again, chasing the hysterical girl to a lofty ledge, where he takes one of the more memorable slo-mo missteps in cinema history, and plummets, screaming, several thousand feet to the jagged rocks below, or at least an unreasonable dummy facsimile does.Roll credits.

"I don't usually terrorize women vacationing in Greece with a sickle, but when I do, I make sure I'm hopped up on Amyl Nitrite first." 
Ironically, the cover art depicted above would find itself on a Turkish poster for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning(!), with Robert Morley's familiar face painted over with a goalie mask, but Wings Hauser chasing Meg Foster down the length of the sickle inexplicably remains.Turks are fucking weird, aren't they?
Hauser would again appear in front of Mastorakis' lens the following year in 'Nightmare at Noon', most recently scoring a credit in Rubber(2010).Foster is a Reading, Pa. native who's appeared in everything from Welcome to Arrow Beach/ aka Tender Flesh(1974), and They Live(1988), to Leviathan(1989) and 1994's Shrunken Heads, and will be appearing in Rob Zombie's latest effort, Lords of Salem.With those glow-in-the-dark blue eyes, I can't hold it against her.During his long career, McCallum has scored genre credits in television shows like Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, while you'll most likely remember Morley as the rotund theater critic forced to eat his poodles by Vincent Price in 1973's Theater of Blood.After giving a critically acclaimed performance as Charlie Manson in 1976 tele-pic Helter Skelter, Steve Railsback has turned up in everything from Lifeforce(1985) to Ed Gein(2000), and even Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects(2005).On the scale, Wind merits a solid two Wops, and is well worth a look.

Now that's what I call: κολύμπι στο ποτάμι του λάσπη νέον σε Έλληνες πουλόβερ, or 'Swimming in the river of Neon Slime in a Greek sweater'.