"Teenage Hitchhikers" (1975) d/ Gerri Sedley

Once upon a time, before the advent of interstate serial killers, teenage girls often took to the roadside, flashed some cleavage, and flipped up a thumb to get where they were going. Of course, the unwritten hitchhiking commandment was something like, "Gas, grass, or ass. Nobody rides for free.", so every excursion was a potential adventure waiting to jump off. In tonight's review, we document the madcap hijinks of a pair of hippie chicks, Sandra Peabody/Cassel, who you'll remember as the sweet young thing who gets her chest stiletto-autographed like a high school desk by Krug Stilo, in Wes Craven's seminal shocker, Last House on the Left (1972), and Chris Jordan, who broke into movies four years earlier in a production called Piss Orgy (1971), as they set out to do just that.


"Just look at that halitose halibut...and there's a fish in there, too."
We follow the misadventures of a perky pair of  hippie ride-thumbers named Bird (Sandra Peabody) and Mouse (Chris Jordan, as Kathie Christopher) as they hitchhike their way towards liberation, sexual freedom, and total independence, finding fleshy fun and tumbling into titillating trouble along the way. They get picked up by a camperful of  zooted dirt merchants, and when it looks like they have designs on jackrolling the girls, they sing a rancid hippie folk song instead, and proposition them to a life of groupiedom. The girls splash around in a stream, and Bird catches a trout with her panties. At a roadside diner, they get topless and embarrassingly go-go dance off beat in their drawers for food, which they don't even get, and rightfully so, they're horrible dancers.


This particular Bird (Sandra Peabody) is fogging up my spotting scope.
Before the end credits roll, these two take turns balling a bald-headed travelling salesman, interrupt a crazed, escaped rapist as he's about to force his way onto a chick in a backwoods meadow (sheesh, there was a whole lotta raping going on in movies back then) by stripping down themselves and critiquing his form(!) before okie-doking his ass and tying him to a tree. A wealthy lesbian also succeeds in sapphically seducing the hitch-sisters before the whole zany affair comes to a head at a far out hippie orgy, with thrusting bodies strewn about the pad like mad, Dad. In the end, we see them hitching a ride once again, but when a male driver stops to give them a lift, they run to their convertible, and speed off, giving him a playful bird. Oh, those teenage hitchhikers.


Though the groovy hippie orgy is semi-simulated, bouncy nipples like these will surely leave you stimulated. 
This would be the last film appearance for the sweetly sexy Sandra Peabody/Cassel, who walked away from the industry to produce children's television and teach drama, after having scored seedy credits in things like Love-In 1972 (1971), Voices of Desire (1972), and Filthiest Show in Town (1973). Getting tortured/raped/murdered by David Hess turned out to be her high water mark, cinematically speaking. Chris Jordan, who was once married to porn star Eric Edwards (who scores an uncredited cameo in the hippie orgy scene, by the way) also co-starred with Peabody in 1973's Massage Parlor Hookers, and banged out (ahem) soft and hardcore work up until the mid-seventies in movies like NY sexploitation king Joe Sarno's Confessions of a Young American Housewife (1974) and Misty (1976), before passing away in 1990. Claire Wilbur, you'll recall seeing in Radley Metzger's Score (1974). On the scale Hitchhikers thumbs it's way towards a pair of Wops, worth a look if you dig this sort of thing.


"We've got our own transportation now, so, like, down with you, maaaaaan!"

"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.