Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.

This is the kind of movies that make me feel good. The kind of movies that makes you say: Man! Me and my friends could have made this one!

Anyway.. it's the greatest hippie-road-trip-movie I have ever laid my eyes on

peace

A gas is let loose upon the world that kills anyone over twenty-five years old.

Coming from Roger Corman, I wanted to like this, but it never seemed coherent and I think not enough thought was put into a plot or story arc. There are things I enjoyed, such as the permit guy with the whip and how this was an alternate version of "Logan's Run" (this film came out after the novel but before the film, so whether or not there was an influence, I have no idea).

There was a problem in that almost no one was under 18. This seemed to be teenagers and young adults cutting loose, but who was watching all the infants?

The late 60s/early 70s saw a handful of genuinely odd pseudo counter-culture movies released by American studios, including cult classics like 'The Trip', 'Greetings', 'Psych-Out', 'Cult Of The Damned', 'Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls', and 'Zachariah'. Whether they were "genuine" of just plain exploitation is open to debate, and also a moot point all these years later. Fake or not they are a lot of fun now for 60s buffs. You can add Roger Corman's 'Gas-s-s-s' to that list. The movies premise is that a gas has been accidently released that kills everyone over the age of twenty-five. A hippie on the run from the police (Robert Corff) teams up with a scientist (Elaine Giftos), and the two go on a road trip to New Mexico, trying to find a rumoured hippie Utopia. Along the way they hook up with two couples - revolutionary Ben Vereen ('Roots') and his pregnant rock'n'roll fanatic girlfriend Cindy Williams ('Laverne And Shirley'), and their weirdo pals Bud Cort ('Harold And Maude') and Talia Shire ('Rocky'). The six companions come across many strange situations on their journey, including a militant dune buggy riding football team, Country Joe and The Fish on a golf course, and Edgar Allen Poe, Lenore and The Raven riding a motorbike. Yup, it's one of those kind of movies! Silly, self indulgent, with a lot of half baked (pun intended) jokes that aren't entirely successful. Even so quite a trip if you are in the right frame of mind. Nowhere near as good as Corman's 'Bloody Mama' (released in the same year), but it's probably his most overlooked movie, from a long, varied and consistently underrated career. One day he will receive the recognition he deserves, both as a producer/director, and for getting many important actors and film makers their first breaks.

Impossible to say how Roger Corman's attempt at a loose kaleidoscopic comedy-satire in the Richard Lester vein would have turned out had not American International Pictures re-edited it against his wishes. He left the studio after 15 years with them after this.

The script is decidedly weak, a common Corman failing, full of potentially intriguing, half-formed ideas that are never realised. Meanwhile the cast of unknowns never get any real chance to build up their characters into anything sympathetic or likable. It's as if the director isn't really interested in them.

It's an adequately stylish, and zippy enough production. But like much of Corman's later stuff for AIP, it also has an air of opportunism about it, riding the post-Easy Rider youth-counterculture boom while having only an outsider's empathy with it (Corman was 44 when he made this).

Still, if nothing else he does get a chance to say an ironic farewell to Edgar Allan Poe (the author of Corman's earlier celebrated cult film series), who here appears in period dress riding a Harley Davidson with a stuffed raven on his shoulder!

This was a weird sort of science fiction comedy from "Professor Corman". This film pretty much reminds me of a spaced out version of the short lived show "The New People", which came out a year earlier. The whole idea of everyone over 35 being killed by a gas that didn't work on the younger population was a wild idea to begin with, but the surrealism of this movie even made it wilder to look at. Too bad that Corman's last film for A.I.P. couldn't have been a schlock classic like many of his earlier. At least on the bright side we get to look at a very young Cindy Williams, Talia Shire and Ben Vereen in what was one of, if not their first roles in a motion picture.