"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.

"Candy" (1968) d/ Christian Marquand

Ewa Aulin is probably my favorite blonde of the late sixties/early seventies, exuding a child-like innocence with sensuality so pure, your heart'd probably stop if you tried to snort a line of it. Nowhere is this more evident than her 1968 star-studded counter-culture sexploitative romp, Candy, based on a satirical update on Voltaire's Candide in the form of Terry Southern's novel (but you knew that already). Unfortunately,  Ms. Aulin's acting ability never attained the same levels as her beauty, and this is also painfully obvious to anyone watching the movie, with the bubbly starlet often phonetically sounding out words like she's never heard them before. Propping her up throughout, like a theatrical crutch, are the likes of Richard Burton, John Huston, John Astin, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, and Brando himself. So she's no Bette Davis. She's fucking great to look at.


I'd give the Gobstopper to Slugworth for some of this Candy (Ewa Aulin).
Mr. Christian (Astin) has got his square hands full with his teenage daughter, Candy (Aulin), who's snuck off to see Mac Fisto(Richard Burton), the great poet/piss artist who tries to compromise her morals in the back of his glass-bottomed limo (praise heaped upon the upskirt Gods here), as driven by his faithful manservant, Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson), on a ride home from school, with her father walking in on the self-pickled performer raping a mannequin as his daughter sinks Emmanuel the Mexican gardener's (a completely rotten Ringo Starr in his acting debut) balls atop the pool table. While sending Candy off to live with her libidinous uncle (also John Astin), Mr. Christian is knocked unconscious on the airport runway by Emmanuel's vengeance-minded sisters (with no less than Florinda Balkan among their ranks!) just as they board a plane full of soldiers, as led by General Smight (Walter Matthau), and he naturally tries to play 'hide the bayonet' with Candy at 50,000 feet, before sky diving after his men. I'm starting to notice a pattern developing here...


Flint's knocking at yer backdoor, and he's comin' in.
Back on Terra firma, Candy's unresponsive father is operated on in New York by Dr. Krankheit (James Coburn), an unorthodox neurosurgeon who implants an electrical outlet into the back of his domepiece (later used to power a transistor radio at the raucous after party), triumphantly flipping a bloody bird at the medical theater before helping Candy with her...posture. Ahem. When the patient deliriously wanders out into the street, Candy gives chase, after which she's fucked inside a grand piano by a hunchbacked art thief (Charles Aznavour), groped by a pair of beat cops, and enlightened (insert another 'ahem' here, please) by a phony guru (Marlon Brando) who lives inside a customized eighteen-wheeler.She leaves him frozen solid and follows a mysterious hooded figure that turns out to be her father into a collapsing temple before strolling through a meadow in a plain white dress past all the colorful characters she has encountered along the way; her dress becoming more ornately decorated as she goes, finally returning to her otherworldly form and returning to the stars from whence she came.


"That doesn't feel like a 'Super 8' to me!!"
The striking Aulin turned up in such genre favorites as Giulio Questi's Death Laid An Egg the same year, and Aristide Massaccesi's Death Smiles on a Murderer as well as Jorge Grau's Legend of Blood Castle, both 1973, as well as an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus during it's premier season, interestingly enough. I think many negative critics of tonight's film have been unreasonably austere in their judgment. This one plays like a bump n' grind version of an early Jodorowsky journey, though you'll find more honest to goodness T n' A in Alejandro's work than you ever will here. The thrills, like most of the chuckles you'll encounter in Buck Henry's mirthfully satirical dialog, are cheap, harmless fun. A cult classic packed with groovy psychedelia and frenetic energy that entertains throughout that I'd deduce is easily worth three Wops on the scale.


Could you imagine Brando getting airborne like this in '78? Me, neither.

"The 9 Lives of Fritz the Cat"(1974)d/Robert Taylor

A year ago to the day(Damn, I'm good.) we tackled the first feature focusing on R. Crumb's perverted, pot-smoking fornicatory feline as directed by the legendary Ralph Bakshi, a wildly popular counterculture hit worldwide; it only stands to reason that tonight we oughta take a gander at the sequel that followed two years later.This time around, Bakshi had nothing to do with the production, busy on his own Heavy Traffic(1973) at the time, with the director's chair taken by Robert Taylor, who had worked with Bakshi in the sixties on his superhero cartoon spoof, The Mighty Heroes, and a problematic Crumb-less script that has Fritz reminiscing over his previous incarnations throughout the years, rather than focusing on the seventies the way the prior film dealt with the sixties, as the decade was only four years old at the time(so was your humble narrator, for those keeping score at home).Instead of sex, the sequel is more political(yaaaaawn) in nature this time around, as the filmmakers were looking for an R rating over the X the original earned itself.The result is a critically-panned dud that failed to generate much box office interest and whose very existence is denounced altogether by the character's eccentric bespectacled creator.Though this thing tends to drag a bit, despite the brisk seventy-nine minute running time, I'm here to tell you it still holds a few classic moments of raunchy ethno-humor from bygone days of racial insensitivity, just like yo' mammy used to make.9 Lives is an equal opportunity offender, and several vintage stereotypes are on display here, even my own hippopotami(Italians), though I'm no damned water horse, you dicks, I'm only hung like one.You gotta be able to laugh at yourself every once in a while, kids.

Sitting around high as balls in your own filth never gets old.
As we jump back, baby, into the 1970's, we find Fritz obliviously blowing reefer in his slovenly mess of an apartment to escape the monotony of domestic life, under a constant deluge of New Yawk-flavored verbal abuse and torment from his wife(could this fat-assed feline frau be what became of his girlfriend Winston from the original flick?!!Ee-gads.), whose existence consists of breastfeeding his infant son, Ralphie, and scolding him for the constant masturbation that he learned from observing his deadbeat welfare dad in action.While she's busy belittling our jaded hero, he hazily reminisces about his prior lives, ignoring her barbs and threats...(insert failed marriage joke here)before he has an out-of-body experience on the street below, mercilessly ripping ass on his Puerto Rican friend Juan then relating a cannabis-based sexual liason he had with his amigo's sister, Chita(Louisa Moritz), while two pot-smoking crows case the funky joint for a robbery outside, before her pig father shows up and blows Fritz's ass away with a shotgun.He then bumps into a stumblebum dog that claims to be, among other things, a black belt in karate and God.Fritz turns up next in Nazi Germany(!), where, after being caught in a mother-daughter sammy by his commanding officer, he ends up nearly taking one in the shorts from the fuhrer himself(!!), as he confesses a repressed desire to be a ballet dancer, before incoming artillery blows his last remaining testicle off, and he's smooshed under a tank, from which a Patton-lookalike emerges and shoots a retreating Fritz in his ass, before shooting himself accidentally.After trying to sell a used rubber to Niki, the Italian hippo who runs the liquor store, Fritz reminisces about the thirties.An overlong mixture of live-action nightclub footage from the era and Fritz in top hat n' tails ensues over a musical number that goes on for like, days, man.

If the American military looks like this to you, you might be a pinko commie.
When Morris, the pickle-chomping Jewish parrot who runs the pawn shop, refuses to cash Fritz's welfare check, he hoodwinks the cat into accepting a space helmet in trade for a toilet he'd brought in, reminding him of the time he was an astronaut on a mission to Mars.Fritz sneaks a female black crow reporter aboard the rocket for an exclusive story, as payback "for what my people did to your people", and they end up fucking their way out of Earth's atmosphere, where the capsule explodes.Then he bumps into the ghost of his old crow friend, Duke, leading to a flashback to when all the crows were given New Jersey(!), which they renamed "New Africa"(!!), a separate country from the rest of the United States.Fritz is a courier given a message to deliver to the black president from the white one, an oppossum that resembles Kissinger(!!!), and gets caught in the middle of a power coup and executed by a firing squad for his troubles.Cue another musical cartoon montage where a pig(white) and crow(black) declare war on each other until both are reduced to uncivilized savages, and when the crow basketball-dribbles a boulder onto the head of the pig, killing him, a rat with Nixon's head appears and declares him the winner.We then find Fritz hanging out in the sewers, where a Hindu rabbit floats by on a raft, and a gay Satan emerges from the filth, looking for a misplaced earring.Fritz snaps out of it to find himself still sitting in his crummy living room, getting chewed out by his wife, who follows through on her threat of throwing his good-for-nothing ass out.He briefly(and unnecessarily, we've just watched it all happen once, we haven't forgotten it yet) re-examines each of his past lives before remarking that this current one has to be the worst one he's ever had, boogieing down the street and changing colors to strains of the Tom Scott title track.

"Yo momma so black, dat bitch be leavin' fingerprints on charcoal!"
You might remember Louisa Moritz as the Latin nympho with the jealous boyfriend from Last American Virgin(1982), but she's also worked on a number of other interesting movies like The Man from O.R.G.Y.(1970), Up in Smoke(1979), New Year's Evil(1980), and Chained Heat(1983).It should also be noted that Robert Ridgely who voiced Satan among others in tonight's entry was also responsible for bringing Thundarr the Barbarian to life.Bob Holt, who voiced the wino/God also provided the demon voice in William Girdler's Abby(1974).Glynn Turman, who provides several black voices here, not only chalked up roles in quality blaxploitation classics like J.D.'s Revenge(1976), Five on the Black Hand Side(1973), and Cooley High(1975), but also was husband to "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin for six years towards the end of that decade.I grew up seeing Skip Hinnant on television just about every single day during his six year stint on Electric Company, so you can imagine what it was like instantly recognizing his voice the first time I sat down to watch Fritz(Electric Company was a children's show that followed Sesame Street on PBS back in the seventies) smoke grass and partake in orgies.Hot diggetty.On the scale, 9 Lives merits two solid Wops, and is definitely worth a look if you're into R. Crumb(who isn't?) or seventies adult animation features like this minor cult classic.

On any given day, you can catch a cat like me jumpin' back in similar fashion, baby.