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The counterculture, freshly hatched and already cracking. A little gag early on gives the timbre of sinister quirk, a gust of unearthly wind lifts a paper plane into flight until it explodes against the side of a house, the shaggy lad on the porch calmly pours milk on the miniature fireball. Snatches of Austin ca. 1969, street festivals and antiwar protests, a rare snapshot of the time and place. The pad may be haunted, hippie couples discuss the nature of specters in grainy improv workshops. "How do you explain that?" "Vincent Price was there." Tobe Hooper's experimental debut, "An American Freak Illumination," a zesty jumble of expressive esoterica. Bathtub discussions on communism, "Daisy Bell" on a kazoo. Blood-red bedroom walls versus the half-light of the basement, where a vaguely paranormal entity coruscates something fierce. Jump cuts for the sword fight with the self, Brakhage interludes, Len Lye iridescence. The chiclet in the back of the pick-up truck of course reappears in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a "fossilized clan" is mentioned along the way. A chamber paints itself into a starry sky via stop-animation, carnal psychedelia encapsulates the presiding blur of abstraction and viscera. Just ahead of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, the stars-and-stripes roadster pickaxed and torched, the dropout bare to the world. Reefers are shared but the mute loner prefers to chase the high of the subterranean glow, he packs it inside a valise and strolls into a forest of balloons. Corman's melting cityscapes (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes), Penn's garbage contraption (Mickey One). Gently incubating his flower children under a plexiglass bubble, Hooper goes on to savagely pluck them by the roots in his subsequent slaughterhouse. With Mahlon Foreman, Ron Barnhart, Amy Lester, Kim Henkel, Pamela Craig, Jim Schulman, and Allen Danziger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |