Handsome (and frequently shirtless) young Jesse (Richard Hatch) arrives at an army discharge center with his fiancé Kathy (Susanne Benton) and her rather flaky friend Jo Ella (Ann Noland) to pick up his best buddy, Pat (Doug Chapin). Pat and Jesse have been friends since childhood as we see in the opening montage of B/W photos. Now they are both out of the army, an experience which (very subtly implied) seems to have affected Pat a bit more than Jesse. The two and their girls are going to drive across the desert with an RV and then Jesse and Kathy are going to get married and settle down. But Pat has some different ideas in mind....
This is definitely the most psychologically interesting, and best acted and overall most professional entry in this group of films (from the "Drive-in Cult Classics" DVD set) so far. Hatch and Chapin are both pretty solid, as the just-grown-up man starting to take responsibility, and his younger friend who refuses to and Ann Noland's Jo Ella is convincingly on-the-edge; only Benton's Kathy really comes up short. There's clearly a lot of homo-erotic subtext here -- though Pat keeps explaining that he just wants to screw around, pick up girls, that he doesn't want to settle down with Joe Ella or want Jesse to settle down either, it's obvious that he can't envision a life in which Jesse isn't his main partner, sexual or not. There's a fair bit of nudity here for the exploitation angle, but it's not really gratuitous, rather pretty ordinary as you'd expect with a bunch of young people on the road; even the strip club sequence where Jo Ella impulsively gets up on stage and starts taking it off in front of a bunch of mostly Native Americans on a reservation, leading to some momentary troubles, is very natural and feels quite realistic. Only at the end, as Pat goes really psycho and terrorizes the rest of the quartet on his motorcycle at night, resulting ultimately in an (apparently accidental) death does the film really falter -- it seems to be striving for some kind of existential ending on the one hand, and a more obviously satisfying and cathartic resolution on the other, awkwardly melding the two -- though the last moments I thought were pretty fine.
Offbeat and more serious than the typical Crown International drive-in fare, this has a nice instrumental score by Richard Cunha and some fairly dull country-rock songs interspersed; think low-rent Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers. The photography of the day scenes ranges from nice to excellent - the night stuff looks rather faky. Director Nosseck has kept busy doing cheesy stuff like this and a fair amount of TV work; this was his first film and shows a little bit of promise that he seems to have lived up to, but not really surpassed. Star Richard Hatch of course has played significant roles on both versions of Battlestar Galactica; this was apparently his first theatrical feature and though it's better than its reputation, it's not really something that was going to make him a star. At any rate, another fun entry in this fascinating cycle of cheesiness...
This is definitely the most psychologically interesting, and best acted and overall most professional entry in this group of films (from the "Drive-in Cult Classics" DVD set) so far. Hatch and Chapin are both pretty solid, as the just-grown-up man starting to take responsibility, and his younger friend who refuses to and Ann Noland's Jo Ella is convincingly on-the-edge; only Benton's Kathy really comes up short. There's clearly a lot of homo-erotic subtext here -- though Pat keeps explaining that he just wants to screw around, pick up girls, that he doesn't want to settle down with Joe Ella or want Jesse to settle down either, it's obvious that he can't envision a life in which Jesse isn't his main partner, sexual or not. There's a fair bit of nudity here for the exploitation angle, but it's not really gratuitous, rather pretty ordinary as you'd expect with a bunch of young people on the road; even the strip club sequence where Jo Ella impulsively gets up on stage and starts taking it off in front of a bunch of mostly Native Americans on a reservation, leading to some momentary troubles, is very natural and feels quite realistic. Only at the end, as Pat goes really psycho and terrorizes the rest of the quartet on his motorcycle at night, resulting ultimately in an (apparently accidental) death does the film really falter -- it seems to be striving for some kind of existential ending on the one hand, and a more obviously satisfying and cathartic resolution on the other, awkwardly melding the two -- though the last moments I thought were pretty fine.
Offbeat and more serious than the typical Crown International drive-in fare, this has a nice instrumental score by Richard Cunha and some fairly dull country-rock songs interspersed; think low-rent Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers. The photography of the day scenes ranges from nice to excellent - the night stuff looks rather faky. Director Nosseck has kept busy doing cheesy stuff like this and a fair amount of TV work; this was his first film and shows a little bit of promise that he seems to have lived up to, but not really surpassed. Star Richard Hatch of course has played significant roles on both versions of Battlestar Galactica; this was apparently his first theatrical feature and though it's better than its reputation, it's not really something that was going to make him a star. At any rate, another fun entry in this fascinating cycle of cheesiness...