Hot Summer Week

Half-serious drive-in flick from Fanfare Films has two teenage girls, driving up the coast from Southern California, picking up a handsome hitchhiker; he's a soldier experiencing disturbing flashbacks from his time in the Army, Meanwhile, the police are searching for a serial killer who targets female hippies. This may be one of the earliest movies of the Vietnam-era to imply that soldiers who kill on the battlefield could wind up with damaged mental states once they've returned home. Unfortunately, the movie is so amateurish that no underlying message can rescue it. Michael Ontkean proves to be a self-assured young actor, and Ralph Waite amusingly turns up as a hippie guru with mutton chops, but the young ladies are one-dimensional and unlikable. The cinematography is by David M. Walsh, who later became the go-to director of photography on some of the most popular films of the decade (his wavy, green-tinted flashbacks would be witty under different circumstances). * from ****

Saw this one late one night on television in Sweden, and went on watching, mostly because of Michael Ontkean. It's supposedly a thriller about two hitch-hiking girls. But this movie is just hilarious, with bizarre flashbacks, a freaky hippie community, and an ending that makes you wonder whether they had a script writer at all. A must-see for lover of bad films. You'll get at lot of laughs.

"Hot Summer Week" is one of the worst, but definitely also the most pathetic exploitation movie of the early 70s. Why pathetic? Because it features all the right ingredients to serve up a delicious and raunchy drive-in dish, but for some reason doesn't use them correctly, and the whole thing ends up being dull, dumb and dire! Listing these ingredients sure makes the film sound terrific: two underage but lewd girls on a summer trip to the beach and picking up random hitchhikers, a traumatized and violent Vietnam veteran wandering about, a deranged hippie beach-cult and continuous news bulletins about a murderous maniac at large. Sounds like unhinged, but it's actually pure shenanigans! The girls are wannabe cool chicks, but remain sad and prudish wallflowers throughout the entire story. Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Truman from "Twin Peaks") depicts the only Vietnam vet I've ever seen who has flashbacks about the conversations in his superior's office rather than from within the jungle-battlefield, the cult is laughably cliched (sitting around in a circle, hugging and telling "I love you" to each other) and the "maniac" doesn't kill any victims on-screen until very late in the plot, when you already stopped caring. Literally everyone in the film attempts to sleep with everyone, but nobody ever pulls it off! Ontkean's "flashbacks" are too long, too numerous and shown in the most amateurish way imaginable, with shady and blurry camera footage and words endlessly being repeated.

I'm not sure why, but I kind of liked this. It's very tame--aside from some brief nudity it could have been a TV movie. (The presence of sexploitation star Uschi Digardt might suggest a much racier movie, but she is literally only in a single brief shot in the opening credits). The plot is randomly weird, and the ending is infuriatingly ambiguous. Then there is the title song which. . . well, let me put it this way: if you went up to anybody on the street and asked them to make up a 70's-style song on the spot and sing it a capella, it would probably sound better than the one in this movie.

Two girls who have just graduated from high school take a trip out to the California beach. After causing an accident by flashing a passing motorist and getting rousted by the police, they pick up a hitch-hiker (Michael Ontkean) who is suffering from traumatic flashbacks caused by his time in Vietnam. The hitchhiker brings them to a commune headed by a guru (played by the guy who went on to become TV's "Papa Walton")and a drug-addled crazy who calls himself "the Creator". Meanwhile, someone is going around strangling young women. . .

This movie manages to capture some of the strange ambiance of this era, but not in the annoyingly self-reflexive way most later movies would (the music may be terrible, but at least it's not the usual overused cues for collective Baby-Boomer nostalgia). The two girls are pretty and appealing, and surprisingly innocent--this may be the first movie where young protagonists vow to lose their virginity and then completely fail to do so. (The brunette ALMOST gets it on with Papa Walton, which in itself is worth the price of admission). This is not very good, but it's an interesting time-capsule piece from the era kind of like "Last Summer", "Runaway, Runaway", "The Todd Killings", or "Welcome to Arrow Beach"

Set in the early 70's, this film begins with two high school girls by the name of "Debbie" (Kathleen Cody) and "Karen" (Dianne Hull) deciding to drive to Big Sur to enjoy a weekend of fun on the beach. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker named "Will" (Michael Ontkean) who has just gotten out of the Army after spending some time over in Vietnam. And although he seems friendly enough, his experiences in Vietnam have left him extremely traumatized. So much so, that he often reacts with violence whenever he becomes angered. On a similar note, as it so happens, a serial killer has also recently come upon the scene coinciding with Will's appearance at a hippy commune in that same area--the same commune which both Debbie and Karen are soon to visit. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this movie was made during a time when drive-ins were starving for just about anything they could get their hands on due to the fact that the regular theaters were acquiring all of the mainstream films in circulation. So, to partially resolve this problem, low-budget films of this type were hurriedly produced and disseminated to the drive-ins on a frequent basis. Yet even then it wasn't enough and many of these same drive-ins eventually closed all the same. But I digress. In any case, this film starts off rather slowly but then gets interesting after the first 20 minutes or so--before coming to a screeching halt at the very end. Quite honestly, it's almost as if they ran out of money and didn't have any more film on hand at that point. Be that as it may, while I don't consider this to be a terrible film necessarily, the low-budget aspects were simply too prevalent to be ignored, and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.