| Product: |
The Trip (DVD) |
| Date: |
12.04.08 (64 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Amazing trippy effects and great music
Disadvantages: Very self-indulgent
A review of the MGM DVD.
This is a fabulous drug film from 1967. It was made by low-budget king Roger Corman, who had moved on from gothic horror to films aimed more explicitly at a youth audience keen to experience counterculture at a safe distance. It's one of the best psychedelic films ever made.
An uptight advertising director, Paul, takes some LSD, watched over by his friend John. And, er, that's it. The film is essentially a lengthy sequence of psychedelic effects of varying intensity, interspersed with hippie blather about the death of the self and what have you. It will more than likely try the patience of anyone who doesn't like retro drug movies.
The acting is good. Peter Fonda plays Paul, and he's convincing as a man experiencing the effects of LSD (Fonda was a regular user himself at the time). Bruce Dern plays his chilled out friend John, and Dennis Hopper plays another druggie, as well as appearing as a kind of grand inquisitor in a fantasy sequence. (Just to complete the later-to-be-in-Easy-Rider set, Jack Nicholson wrote the script.) Other actors aren't in it so much, but all convey drugged up flower children pretty well. Corman perennial Dick Miller has a tiny role as a distinctly unhip looking barman.
The real joys of this film aren't anything to do with the quality of acting, though, or the storyline. It really all comes down to décor, music and, er, trippyness. The décor is amazing - there are so many wonderful examples of hippie interior decorating, all of which would give you a migraine if you actually lived in them. Beads, baubles, great big splodges of colour everywhere - it's a nightmare vision of a very peculiar aesthetic utopianism that could never have caught on if you weren't on acid.
The music suffers somewhat by not being famous. The 60s counterculture is heavily identified with certain bands, but I guess Corman was too cheap to invest in any 'real' music (also, 1967 was slightly early for a lot of the really iconic 60s trip music). But the generic acid rock soundtrack is well suited to the film, and there are some nicely authentic moments of whimsy mixed in among the more obvious Hammond organ and rocky guitar stuff. Yet another soundtrack that's crying out for a CD release.
And the trippyness is great! A lot of it just involves crazy coloured lights being projected onto Peter Fonda's face, but other parts are more wildly innovative. (This film in general is a lot more experimental than Corman's usual films. There's a really nice panning shot at the beginning that follows a joint being passed around a room which is better thought out and choreographed than anything else I can think of in any of his films) There's a chase sequence that uses a series of still images rapidly edited together to create a kind of flick-book effect.
The editing is at times astonishingly frenetic, throwing in images from all over the place. This can have an intensely disorientating effect (it's a film about LSD, so that's probably a good thing); the montage sequence before the film ends in incredible. (Remember how feted Oliver Stone was for the wide range of different techniques he used in Natural Born Killers? The Trip basically does pretty much all of NBK's fancy montage tricks decades earlier, and with a more endearing and humanistic effect). The camera becomes much jerkier during hallucination sequences, which mirrors what I remember about being on the drug, and while nothing can truly capture the LSD experience, it's certainly not a bad try. It's more fun than Easy Rider, and certainly better than the likes of Psyched by the 4-D Witch.
There are some hallucination sequences that are profoundly silly, and seem to be more the kinds of things that people imagine you'd experience on acid than anything that would actually happen. But what the heck, they're a lot of fun anyway, and any film that puts a dwarf on a merry-go-round can't possibly be bad.
This is as self-indulgent as Corman ever got (he was a relentlessly commercial director), but self-indulgence was 'in' in 1967. I suspect many people will be totally uninterested by The Trip, or even irritated by it. Plus it is basically an advert for an illegal substance (which meant the film was banned in the UK until early in the 21st century. Its 18 certificate must be because of the premise, as there's nothing explicit on screen at all; all the naked ladies have body paint all over them, and there's no violence). There's a straight-faced warning notice at the start of the film, but you can just imagine a cinema full of smelly, tripping hippies jeering at it. This is close in spirit to Reefer Madness, but it has even less of an anti-drugs message.
I love this film - it's a blast. It probably represents a point just before the whole hippie dream turned unbearably self-indulgent (a transition that is illustrated by the difference between Sgt Pepper and the White Album). If this sounds like it would annoy the hell out of you, just avoid it. If you're having one of those days where you realise you're one with and part of an ever-expanding loving joyful glorious and harmonious universe, this is probably for you.
The DVD has generally good picture quality - the colours look particularly good, although some sequences seem to have slight damage to the print (it *might* be a psychedelic effect of some kind). There's also a trailer that's probably preaching to the converted; I doubt you had to try to sell this to people who were interested. This will cost you less than £4 on amazon, quite a bargain.
Summary: One of the great psychedelic films
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