I used to have a Rotten Tomatoes blog called “Psychedelic Fruit”. With any luck, this may become some sort of irregular featurette here: reviews of schlocky acid filmography.
Let’s begin with two movies from the late ’60s about the permissive drug culture that existed on the Spanish isle of Ibiza. For a long time, apparently, the laws in Spain were sort of hazy about drugs and what now gets called “drug tourism” happened there frequently, although nowadays they’re sadly apparently cracking down a lot more on it.
The first one of these films – More- is, in this writer’s estimation, fairly good. The second – Hallucination Generation - was found to be about as lame as eating crap blotter and watching Dragnet for 5 hours, without some fun person along for the ride with you with whom you could laugh about how silly it was.
Filmic oddities were awfully hard to find in the days before these glory days of the Internet’s tentacles being able to provide anyone who’s got about $35 a month to spend for connectivity with instant accessibility to damn near everything ever made. In my high school days–which were the early eighties– I was a rabid Pink Floyd fan, one of those “I-own-every-album-they-ever-made” types. I also had a coffee table book about Pink Floyd that mentioned that the album More was a soundtrack for a film made by Barbet Schroeder, although no further information was offered on the film. (Probably because it had not been too successful, and the band didn’t seem to care much for the album, either.)
So not only could More be found in nary a video store, it seemed that even information on it was scarce. The same was true of Obscured By Clouds and Zabriskie Point, two other films from this era that Pink Floyd soundtracked. I had to wait until I became an adult – or rather, a Berkeley student – before I I finally got to see those latter two Floyd films playing at revival houses. I loved both of them, particularly the latter…which could have had something to do with all the acid, but I don’t think that was entirely responsible for my fondness for them.
But still, More was nowhere to be found: I thought maybe they ought to change the name to Less.
Then a whole bunch of years and lots more messing around in my mental la-dee-dah lands went by and it actually wasn’t until this bloody year of 2009 that I was able to finally find Moreand watch it–although if I had a credit card, I could’ve ordered it years sooner.
More follows the adventures of a naive wanderer from Germany, Stefan (Klaus Grunberg) who is on some sort of Wanderjahr, and finds himself hanging around the underground environs of Spain. There, he encounters the fey, blonde Estelle (Mimsy Farber) and takes a shine to her. She and her friends proceed to spend long stretches of time passing joints around with people sitting around on cushions at parties, and then having lengthly conversations that are difficult to follow. But Estelle herself becomes quite easy to follow, when she invites Stefan to come spend the week in Ibiza with her at her place.
As the two become lovers we’re treated to them having drawn-out hazy sex, with well-timed Floydian audio backdroppage, in her exotic bedroom with the hanging gauzy curtains, or while lazing about on the lovely shores of this enchanted island. The conversations they have start to revolve more and more (sorry for that!) around the subject of drugs as the movie slowly unwinds itself. Eventually, Stephan becomes vexed by his girlfriend’s repeated disappearances, followed by her weird mood swings upon returning from wherever she’s been; she is first way too happy, then suddenly she’s all sullenness and anger for no apparent reason. (This, of course, never happens to people who get stoned. Or at least apparently this never occurred to Stephan.)
Finally, circumstances have their way with the two of them, and Estelle’s secret vice becomes something she can no longer hide: pot and sex are not her only kicks. She likes to mix them with something…more. Thus begins her inevitable seduction of her beau into her other hobby…which is riding horseback.
As if there weren’t enough clues, already, that this was made in 1969: no one calls heroin “horse” any more… except maybe the people who call marijuana “grass”. (Like I say: no one.) Anyway, that’s what she calls it. It’s not long before Stefan is saddling up too, and then their affair all goes expectedly to Hell from that point on.
There have been a million heroin scare movies made. Most of them are flagrantly stupid, especially because they’re so fucking ridiculous people can easily dismiss them, and come to assume that the whole horrid junkie withdrawal syndrome is just another fish from the bucket of lies the Drug Prohibitionists have foisted upon the populace. Then they go and try heroin, get hooked on it, try to quit, and find out that…! Of all the times for them to have been right about something, it was that stuff about what heroin can do to someone…finding that yes, it is exactly that horrible to come off of. More is a bit easier to believe than other heroin movies, because it shows in unabashed beauty that at first, it actually does feel quite good. But only at first.
The Vulture sheepishly admits she had a phase of her own underground adventures involving falling down the slippery-slope-becoming-a-steep-precipice that is heroin – thankfully, 20 years behind her now. But that makes her a qualified judge of heroin movies. The scenes in More faithfully render the experience. There’s far too many drug films that are obviously made by people who have never done a drug in their lives, or even had friends who did to consult for research. This obviously wasn’t the case for Barbet Schroeder: however honestly or dishonestly he came by the experience, it was certainly rendered honestly enough.
At first it would appear that More and Hallucination Generation have a lot in common: the subject of drugs, the setting of Ibiza, the protagonist being a wayward traveling twentysomething male…but after that, all similarities sharply cease. Unlike More, Hallucination Generation is a complete farce when it comes to authenticity. Someone – well, Edward Mann, if anyone cares – made this as a total exploitation flick which seems to jarringly also be some sort of cautionary tale. Whatever the case, it doesn’t seem to be based on anyone’s personal experience, despite what the narration at the start of it claims. It’s so far off the mark it’s funny–at least it would be, perhaps, if you were watching it stoned enough. I was not.
In the sordid world of this flick, the virgin mind of Ibiza drifter Billy Williams is not introduced to drugs by a lover, but instead, by someone who’d never be all that persuasive: this asshole wannabe beatnik Eric (George Montgomery) who’s abusive, dull, and treats his wife like crap…in short, he’s the kind of friend who offends so many people that in any realistic situation, he’d be no one’s friend for very long.
Eric is not the sort of person that tends to get people who aren’t into drugs convinced that maybe they should be. He’s too old to have been a hippie, so he apparently fancies himself someone who they’d view as a Learyite leader down the path to Better Living Through Chemistry. All he actually seems to do is give various young boys dope in exchange for their company, so he can hold court with people who’ll actually pay attention to him–but his acolytes don’t seem to be interested in anything he’s saying while on the drugs he gives them. They all never seem to do anything while they’re high except play poker. Who the hell plays cards on acid, anyway?
When he finally gives poor Billy the LSD, he chooses to torture him mentally instead of even attempting to be a “guide”, spending most of his trip pressuring him in the most ridiculous way that he ought to rob a bank the following day, and give him all the money. (Yeah, that’s exactly who I want when I am planning a bank heist: a kid on a bad acid trip!)
I suppose this was scripted that way on purpose, to at least appear to preserve the idea that only complete losers will take drugs or give them to people. But that’s exactly what makes it completely ineffective as a persuader. No one will believe an iota of it–perhaps even people who’ve never taken drugs will fail to think this to be an accurate representation of the “scene”. This film doesn’t even quite ring the “so bad, it’s good” bell, because the viewer will get bored long before the irony has a chance to start taking effect.
Visually, this would have to be about the worst drug movie ever made, I shit you not. Imagine someone making a movie about acid and filming it in black and white! I suppose the idea was to make the trip scenes, which are really nothing but red and green colour filters shoved over the camera lens, somehow more effective. It fails. Badly. And the hallucinating doesn’t even start until the film’s more than three-quarters of the way over.
The Vulture almost couldn’t even watch the whole damn thing, but realized that as a reviewer, she had to take ALL the medicine in the dose, if she was to do her job right. But oh, what a bore. Hallucination Generation is the cinematic equivalent of bunk drugs. (To see just how asinine it is, watch this trailer of it on YouTube.)
This very rotten fruit was found on something called the “Grindhouse Channel”, which is broadcast by TVU Networks on a free, downloadable software widget which is actually pretty neat, since it gets about 1,000 different TV channels from around the world, and unlike other programs of this type, it actually works. “Grindhouse Channel” is sponsored by a British outfit called The Nostalgia Merchant. You might enjoy the channel, if only to marvel that things this bad could actually have ever been made. (True to form, they have a rather horrid-looking website, too.)
