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Out of the gung-ho base and into the world, the military-industrial complex's tipping point. "To you, it may be deadly. But to us, it's really a gas." Death from instant old age (cp. Wild in the Streets), a comprehensive burlesque on the youthful apocalypse and an adjustment of Roger Corman themes (Teenage Cave Man, Last Woman on Earth, The Trip, etc.). Shaggy adolescents on the run (Robert Corff, Elaine Giftos), plus Bud Cort in tinted shades and Ben Vereen in guerrilla regalia and Cindy Williams with her jukebox nostalgia, "the pot-smoking minority" versus the silent majority. New fads for the Old West, the road to the Oracle passes through the arid America of fascist gridiron and vegetarian commune. "Two, four, six, eight—who do we annihilate? Everybody!" Corman's slaphappy Weekend, parallel with Zabriskie Point and The Strawberry Statement and a good deal funnier than either of them. The endless desert as an absurdist arena for roaming cliques, the new barbarians wear football helmets while the Wild Angels gang rides golf carts. Start over, give it back to the Indians, the kids are all right. "And that's democracy in action." The original hippie goes unnoticed in church, though the Divine Voice thunders on to interrupt a Country Joe and the Fish concert. (The actual presiding deity turns out to be Alfred E. Neuman.) Humanity's rebirth is watched with cautious optimism by Edgar Allan Poe astride a chopper, seconded by a filmmaker who's already pulverized civilization half a dozen times on screen. "Look, man, we all have our inconsistencies. But that doesn't stop the revolution, does it?" With Talia Shire, Alex Wilson, Alan Braunstein, and George Armitage.
--- Fernando F. Croce |