Jack Nicholson: First Of The Day ("Easy Rider", 1969) (video)

 

Video by Porfle Popnecker. I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

 

 

Jack Nicholson: First Of The Day ("Easy Rider", 1969) (video)

HELL RIDE -- Movie Review by Porfle

 Originally posted on 9/27/13

 

Is the phrase "Quentin Tarantino Presents" before a film's title a reliable sign of quality?  After watching HELL RIDE (2008), my answer to that question would be, in a word, no.  And in two words, hell no.  If this is any indication, then Tarantino might as well start calling people into the bathroom after he takes a dump so that he can proudly "present" the results to them.

What little storyline there is often gets lost in the seemingly random editing, or is put on hold every time some mangy old biker dudes get their hands on the non-stop parade of salacious silicone babes who seem to infest this flick like tribbles.  What it all boils down to is that way back in 1976, some rival bad-guy bikers called the Six Six Sixers murdered good-guy biker Pistolero's girlfriend, and now, thirty some-odd years later, Pistolero (writer-director Larry Bishop), with the help of fellow gang members the Victors, decides to get revenge. 

I've read that Bishop used to be a biker himself and has firsthand experience with the lifestyle, which seems to add zero validity to this particular project.  Basically what you've got here is a bunch of middle-aged actors who have been roped into a turkey and they know it, so they're just goofing their way through it.  Michael Madsen, who has been known to sleepwalk through films he doesn't take seriously, invests about as much effort in the role of Pistolero's devil-may-care cohort "The Gent" (he wears a tuxedo jacket instead of a leather jacket for some damn reason) as he would if his neighbor pointed a home video camera at him. 

David Carradine, as rival gang leader "The Deuce", is there simply to lend whatever coolness factor he can to his few scenes, while Dennis Hopper comes off as nothing more than a silly old fart.  Even Vinnie Jones as evil, oral-sex-obsessed rival biker "Billy Wings" seems embarrassed here, which may be the film's most noteworthy accomplishment. 

As for young Eric Balfour as the mysterious newcomer Cheyenne, he seems to take the whole thing about as seriously as Bishop, meaning that he's just as arch and stiff a presence.  Nobody,  however, can match Larry Bishop's hernia-inducing attempts to be a badass--at times, he treats the simple act of standing in one spot with such sinew-stretching intensity that we fear he may implode.

The movie is filled with flashbacks, flash forwards, changes in style, changes in film stock, switches from color to black-and-white and back, zoom-ins, zoom-outs, focus fiddling, and most other types of cinematic frou-frou you can think of, but there's no rhyme or reason to any of it.  Bishop's clearly trying to be arty in several sequences, but his visuals look sloppy instead.  And when his character goes out into the desert and takes peyote in one scene, this gives the director an excuse to indulge in the usual meandering drug-trip nonsense with its skin-deep philosophizing.

There are homages to Tarantino's homages, such as a mysterious box whose contents we never get to see, and a POV shot looking up from inside the box that's a miniature version of the way Tarantino shoots people opening car trunks.  There's the jukebox soundtrack, featuring several truly ear-curdling songs.  And of course, there's the dialogue.  HELL RIDE contains stretches of dialogue that might make you wish Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega had never discussed foot massages or mentioned the words "Royale with cheese." 

At one point Pistolero and his aptly-named girlfriend Nada (sexy Leonor Varela) get into a pun war that includes every possible variation of the word "fire"--she's got a fire that needs putting out, he's got the firehose, she's a fire alarm, he's a fire-eater, etc.  It's a wonder they didn't manage to work "fire ants" into it somewhere.  Later, Bishop starts doing the same thing with the word "business", and you start wishing you could just grab a gun and shoot at the screen like Elvis used to do.

The impression I get from this movie's publicity is that if you liked GRINDHOUSE, you should love HELL RIDE.  But as far as I'm concerned, whatever you may have liked about one is sadly lacking in the other.  Getting the "right" actors together and having them be super tough and spout loopy dialogue at each other doesn't make a good movie if there isn't a decent story and a solid directorial vision.  HELL RIDE's problem is that it thinks it's a cool-as-hell movie to begin with, but doesn't have what it takes to actually be one.

HELL RIDE -- Movie Review by Porfle

THE TRIP -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 3/12/16

 

Sometime in the heady days of the late psychedelic 60s, the already legendary independent filmmaker Roger Corman decided--not for the first time--to do something just a little different. 

The result, which would tickle the fancy of counterculture audiences while raising the hackles of the straight crowd, was THE TRIP (1967), the story of a man's chemically-fueled journey into his own head.  (A fitting tagline for the film would've been "It's all in his head.")

The man in question is a young Peter Fonda as a television commercial director who's in the process of getting divorced by his wife. Peter can't seem to find meaning in his life, so he decides to take the new drug LSD which is supposed to open up the mind and lead one into a whole new universe of awareness.



With his trusted friend Bruce Dern to act as both a guide and a sort of comforting guru, Peter takes the drug and is swept into a sometimes dazzling, sometimes frightening mental odyssey which takes up the entire rest of the picture.

Much of it consists of the kind of psychedelic op-art visuals which were meant in those days to give us the impression of what an LSD trip was like, accompanied by some vintage acid rock by a group called The American Music Band (aka The Electric Flag). 

There are occasional bits with that jumbled, thrown-together look of the Monkees' celluloid oddity HEAD (which scripter Jack Nicholson also co-wrote) with a little "H.R. Pufnstuf" thrown in.  One or two scenes even appear as though Fonda has landed in one of Corman's own atmospheric Poe movies.



The early scenes in Dern's apartment tend to lag, with Fonda lying around being dazzled by all the kaleidoscope colors and dream images that assail both him and the viewer while the bearded, soft-spoken Dern, who is at his calmest and least villainous here than I've ever seen him, diligently keeps his pal from panicking or tumbling off the balcony. 

Only after Fonda escapes from the safety of Dern's pad does THE TRIP really become eventful, and even then there isn't much of a plot to speak of as he wanders into a sleeping family's house to watch their TV, causes a ruckus at a go-go club managed by Corman regular Dick Miller, and runs from what he imagines is an ever-closing police dragnet, all of which is littered with random imagery and scattershot editing.

There's a lot of stream-of-consciousness stuff dotted with encounters, both real and imagined, between Peter and people such as his soon-to-be-divorced wife Sally (Susan Strasberg), with whom he has psychedelic sex, or a pretty blonde hippie girl (Salli Sachse of the "Beach Party" movies) who strikes his fancy in a big way.

In one of the film's more interesting scenes, a haggard housewife (Barboura Morris of WASP WOMAN and BUCKET OF BLOOD) is doing a load of clothes in a laundrymat when Peter bursts in and freaks out about how amazing the spin cycle is.  Another long, surreal fantasy scene finds the troubled Fonda agonizing over the pros and cons of his life thus far with future EASY RIDER collaborator Dennis Hopper, who's all done up in mod garb. 

To their credit, so to speak, stars Fonda and Hopper as well as Corman himself actually took LSD beforehand in order to understand what they were attempting to depict, as did screenwriter Nicholson, whose script gives us an interesting look inside the head of the superstar-to-be.  

In addition to Hopper, Strasberg, Miller, Morris, and Dern, the cast is dotted with several familiar faces and members of Corman's stock company including Michael Nader ("Dynasty"), Beach Dickerson (CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA), Michael Blodgett (BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS), Angelo Rossitto (FREAKS), and the wonderful Luana Anders (EASY RIDER, THE LAST DETAIL, DEMENTIA 13).

An interesting aspect of Dennis Hopper's involvement is seeing little ways in which Roger Corman's directing style would show up in Hopper's own work on EASY RIDER, notably in the sometimes rapid-fire editing and the composition of the drug sequences.  One particular shot, a 360-degree pan of some people passing a joint around a circular table, is virtually duplicated by Hopper in EASY RIDER with some hippie commune dwellers sitting around the dinner table.

And speaking of EASY RIDER, Peter Fonda gets to emote much more here than he would as the disaffected Wyatt in the later film.  I've never thought much of his early acting before, but I'll have to reconsider that now.  He's fun to watch in this role and helps give the disjointed, unconventional narrative much of its otherwise limited appeal.

The DVD from Olive Films is in widescreen with Dolby 2.0 sound.  No subtitles.  A trailer for the film is the sole extra.  This version of THE TRIP does not include the studio-imposed introductory warning about the dangers of LSD nor a final shot in which a cracked image of Peter Fonda implies his character's shattered psyche.

Whether or not Fonda's truth-seeking everyman derives any valuable insights or revelations from his LSD experience still seems to be pretty much up in the air at the end of THE TRIP.  But for us, this interesting, often fun, and inherently fascinating cinematic odyssey (oddity?) is a trip well worth taking.

THE TRIP -- DVD Review by Porfle

Porfle's Trivia Quiz #11: "EASY RIDER" (1969) (video)

This low-budget biker movie directed by Dennis Hopper revolutionized the late 60s film industry.

Question: who plays the buyer that Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) sell cocaine to?

A. Larry Bishop
B. Dick Cavett
C. Sammy Davis, Jr.
D. Phil Spector
E. Herb Alpert

Question #2: who plays the lawyer that Wyatt and Billy meet in jail?

A. Robert Blake
B. Jack Nicholson
C. Robert Duvall
D. Mark Rydell
E. Rip Torn

Question #3: What noted recording artist plays a New Orleans prostitute?

A. Cher Bono
B. Pat Benetar
C. Toni Basil
D. Diana Ross
E. Grace Slick

I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

Porfle's Trivia Quiz #11: "EASY RIDER" (1969) (video)

Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper in Monkees' Film "Head" (1968) (video)

A young Jack Nicholson co-wrote the Monkees' wildly surrealistic film "Head."

He even made a brief cameo appearance...
...along with future "Easy Rider" co-star Dennis Hopper.

The bizarre film was similar to the 1967 Nicholson-penned "The Trip" (1967) with Peter Fonda.

But Monkees' teenybopper fans didn't know what to make of it, and it helped deep-six the band.


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper in Monkees' Film "Head" (1968) (video)