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Home , Bruce Dern, Love beads, Richard Rush (director), The Seeds

5 D. F~ B y, JIM M o . R TON

truction of their lives. The classic example of this plot is Reefer Madness . D rugs have long been a favorite topic of exploitation • Long before it became popular, LSD was mentioned in films. They allow the filmmaker to include the seamiest kinds William Castle's 1959 film, The Tingler, which starred Vin- of sex and violence, while maintaining a facade of moral cent Price as a doctor who discovered that every time a righteousness and social concern. Drug movies date back to person gets frightened, a centipede-like creature begins to the silent film era, when cocaine was still a new thrill and grow along the spine. The only way to subdue this creature is opium was smoked in the hidden dens of Chinatown. An by screaming. In the film, Price attempts to experience "The early example is Douglas Fairbanks' The Mystery of the Leap- Tingler" firsthand by injecting himself with LSD.Price's bra- ing Fish, which depicted both drugs in use-and with little vado performance while under the influence stands out as retribution. the first acid freak-out in cinema history. •Regardless of the drug involved, the plots of most of these • In the mid-sixties, when the world at large discovered the films follow a general pattern: young Dick and Jane are joys of LSD,people said they saw monsters, flew to the moon nagged by their "friends" to try a certain drug that is "the and touched the hand of God.Filmmakers attempting to rage." Being "good kids," Dick and Jane resist at first but recreate these images came up with a wildly creative new eventually yield to peer pressure, resulting in the total des- movie style that could he termed "garage surrealism," Fish-

TASTE A MOMENT OF MADNESS ... LlSTEN TO THE SOUND OF PURPLE come where the PLEASURE LOVERS are

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. -_ ..... _------.~------Feminist singer Holly Near "grooves out" with Jordan Christopher and friends in Angel. Angel. Down We Go.

eye lenses, painted women, op-art patterns and multiple Sadistic Hypnotist), lesbians again get the treatment, this exposures became de rigueur for any film illustrating the time as sadomasochistic leather freaks who have the tables effects of acid. turned on them after being forced to take the drug. • Once the drug became a household word, there was no • No-budget filmmaker Andy Milligan managed to include stopping filmmakers from exploring its possibilities. In The practically every sexual activity imaginable in Depraved!- , a gang of office workers shed their establishment climaxing the film with a girl, high on LSD, leaping from a guises every weekend and hit the road in search of cheap window (a favorite pastime of girls on acid). In the '7Os,John thrills. Their quest is finally fulfilled in the form of a fifty-foot Waters paid homage to this singular type of suicide in his tower of LSD! TUrn On, nine In, Drop Out was Timothy parody, The Diane Linkletter Story. Leary's how-to guide for trippers seeking maximum spiritual • The best "trip" movie is also the best known: Roger Cor- enlightenment. And Ben Van Meter's Add Mantra; Or man's classic The 1Hp. Written by and star- Rebirth of a Nation showed what happens when you give a ring , Bruce Dern and (acidheads stoned a movie camera. all), Tbe 1Hp chronicled the adventures of a young director • The hilarious Hallucination Generation starred George of TV commercials who, feeling that his life has no meaning, Montgomery as a boozy guru of a flock of thrill-seekers. The takes a hefty dose of LSD and spends the rest of the film film was shot in black and white, but director Edward Mann hallucinating his brain away. Corman, to better understand heightened the effectiveness of the "trip" sequences by film- the subject, actually took acid before making the film. Along ing them in color. with 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Trip became required view- • The Weird World of LSD also examined-purportedly- ing for anyone into LSD. the dangers of LSD,but lacked funds for much in the way of • With the advent of acid came the hippie movement, cen- special effects. In one scene, a man hallucinating that he's tering upon a small neighborhood in San Francisco called the flying on the wings of a great bird is shown lying on a couch, Haight-Ashbury, next to Golden Gate Park. advo- grimacing madly, as a crude drawing of a chicken is superim- cated , exploring inner space, a return to nature, posed over the scene! and-most important to exploitation filmmakers=-. • The mind-altering potential of LSDprovoked much specu- Porno filmmakers wasted no time in exploring this aspect. lation. what secret depravities hidden in the libido might be The first "docudrama" on the Haight-Ashburywas titled The released? In Alice in Acidland, a young woman discovers the Evil Pleasure, a rarely seen sexploitatiorter that takes a joys of lesbian sex after taking the drug. In Wanda (The "mondo" look at some kinky aspects of hippie living. Blonde 149 Scene from Movie Star. American Style. or. LSD. I Hate You. on a Bum Trip casts a similar (but kinlder) glance at New substance. "It could be your son or daughter!" the headlines York City's hippie community in the East Village. Along the screamed."It could even be you!" In The Dean's Wife, a man same lines, Wild Hippy Orgy purported to show what really commits suicide after being slipped the drug and confronted went on in those Hashbury crash pads. Produced by a group with his wife's nymphomania. In Wild in the Streets, the called "Pot Heads' Experimental Films," Wild Hippy Orgy entire U.S.Congress unknowingly gets stoned. LSDis used in was double-billed with an even wilder feature titled Psy- The Big Cube to put Lana Turner out of commission. And in cbedelicsex Kicks, which featured nude body-painting, love- Otto Preminger's strangest film, Shidoo, we get to see the making in a balloon-filled room and a woman of Russ effects of acid on Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason. Meyerian proportions making lewd gestures with a python. • All sorts of horrible acts, from robbery to murder, were Together, these films ran a total of eighty-one minutes;"epic" attributed to LSD. The rarely shown Mantis in Lace (aka they weren't. Lila) is the story of a topless dancer who turns on and •Occasionally revived at midnight cinemas is The Hippie becomes a mutilation murderer. In Satan'sSadists,motorcy- Temptation, a made-for-Tv one-hour documentary on the cle thugs dose unwitting girls and then rape them. Russ Haight-Ashbury, showing interviews with key founding fig- Meyer-always attuned to the times-joined in the fun by ures, a concert with light show, a visit to the Psychedelic including the LSD-induced crack-up of "Z-Man" in the cele- Shop (the first hippie store in the world, selling the I Ching, brated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. yarrow sticks, incense, love , and books on meditation, • The '70s saw a decline in the use of psychedelics. Ingre- the tarot, palmistry, astrology, etc.), a visit to a crash pad, and dients like strychnine and speed often turned up in hallucin- other archetypal hippie phenomena. ogens, making each trip a new and dangerous experience. • Psych-Out, produced by and directed by The electric madness of the '60s was replaced with a blander, Richard Rush (Hell'S Angels on Wheels,), more "mellow" attitude. But acid had one good film left in it: starred as a deaf runaway searching for her Jeff lieberman's Blue Sunsbine, released in 1976. It detailed hippie brother in San Francisco. Arriving in the Haightduring the misadventures of a group of ex-druggies, now respected the "," she enlists the help of a ponytailed members of the community, who suffer from a lO-year Jack Nicholson to find her missing brother, played by-in his delayed reaction to a bad batch of LSDwhich turns them into usual weird way-Bruce Dern. With music by Strawberry psychopathic killers who lose their hair along with their Alarm Clock and The Seeds, Psych-Out is the definitive fable minds. of the Hippie Movement. •LSD and -often called "paisley" -are • Reports of people freaking out after being given the drug currently enjoying a speckled resurgence in popularity. unawares began to crop up in the news. Filmmakers leaped Whether this will lead to any new films remains to be to exploit the situation. Now no one was safe from the seen ....• 150

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