Hot Summer Week

"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.

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 ****

Seeing Ralph waite, the father on The Waltons, play a hippie who runs a commune and hits on 17-year-olds is worth the price of this baby! Plus, you gotta see his sideburns! The plot is no worse than any other road movie, and this is one of many, many female road movies that came before Thelma and Louise and gets no credit.

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.

While 'Hot Summer Week' might be regarded in more feral-minded circles as being one of the more deliberately chaste examples of an exploitative 70s roughie, this refreshingly bizarre B-Movie mantra of the pinkly-pervasive, bikini-clad Big Sur-set juvenile jollies of two nit-witted nubiles is not without some prurient interest! These absurdly naïve, soft-headed, hard-bodied ninnies decide gigglingly to opportunistically pick up witheringly handsome, sleek-chested Vietnam-vet Will (Michael Ontkean), an outwardly wholesome, entirely edible, white-bread, medium-cut young blade, internally riven with debilitating PTSD, thereby frequently making the dashing, curly-haired GI prone to grisly outbursts of uncontrollable violence, and the profoundly frustrated, thrill-seeking teens, while initially titillated by the tall, taciturn hunk of burning neurosis, their frightfully muddled, 'ill-managed à trois' goes largely unfulfilled, as the girl's steely innocence, lack of experience, along with wonky Will's greatly distempered mind make for frustratingly unconsummated bedfellows, boisterously culminating in a rather awkward proto-slasher movie climax centring around the pseudo-psychedelisized, Manson-light, grab-ass machinations of an asinine hippie encounter group enigmatically led by the generously mutton-chopped, mop-topped twerp John (Ralph Waite) who fatally discovers that one of their THC-Hazed, flouncily-adorned troupe might shockingly be a murderously warped woman slayer!!! Egad!!!

While ultimately a trifle disappointing, due in no small part to its singular lack of illicit, sweaty-palmed content, 'Hot Summer Week' aka 'Girls on The Road' steadfastly maintains cinematic interest due to its fascinatingly schizoid, fish nor fowl nature, and the unusual narrative's noisome blend of earnest anti-war beatnik blather, and the screenplay's frequently hilarious dissertations of egregious hippie clap-trap being far from seamlessly melded with a vanilla exploration of nascent teenage desires bemusedly coalesces into a vainglorious cinematic misshape, and having Papa Walton as the stoner-boner, Scooby Doo-ing, mush-headed guru was the glisteringly burnished B-Movie glacé cherry atop this overtly saccharine midnight movie titbit! But I have always been a sperm believer in actively supporting the lower-budgeted, independently-minded Drive-In underdog and this spaced-out oddity is still one groovily retrograde head-trip, baby!