Trip with the Teacher

One of Kings' first sexploytation movies( long before the Red Shoes Diary). The teacher sacrifices all for the sake of her students, all for naught. King is his usual loathsome self, a master at "bad" guys. A good movie to waste 90 minutes with, I'd love to have a video of this flick.

Trip with the Teacher is standard exploitation fare that just doesn't fully embrace what it is supposed be, namely, exploitive. The premise has the right formula of sleazy ingredients: Miss Tenny and her group of gorgeous twenty-something women exploring remote desert vistas are joined in their travels by three wayward bikers and are soon stranded somewhere in the desert. After the mentally unstable Al, played by Zalman King in all his face contorting madness, runs down the bus driver in one of his many fits of rage he talks his laid back and seemingly stoned brother Pete into eliminating any witnesses. Unfortunately for them the brothers rode along with good samaritan Jay who attempts to protect the utterly useless women from these two buffoons. Of course Jay manages to screw that up leaving the lovely ladies to fend for themselves by cowering in corners of a dilapidated shack. This is what drove me insane. The women constantly outnumbered their captors and could have easily escaped if they all weren't so helpless. What would be more satisfying than watching a bunch of half-naked tormented women tearing these guys to death? It's an exploitation movie! Exploit! Zalman King with his humongous bug-eyed sunglasses is more annoying than terrifying as his bouts of madness consist of a mess of hair, nose, and giggling. The only redeeming quality of this film is the beautiful women in various states of undress. I was particularly enamored with the bad girl portrayed by the stunning Dina Ousley. With her yellow short-shorts she is definitely the hottest thing in the desert. Trip with the teacher does capture the feel of the early seventies southern California hippie biker culture well. Sadly, after you watch it once you will have no desire to see it again.

Trip with the Teacher (1975)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A teacher takes four of her students on a bus ride through the desert when it breaks down. Three motorcycle riders come across them but the problem is that one of them, Al (Zalman King) is a psychopath and soon they're holding the girls hostage.

TRIP WITH THE TEACHER came from Crown International and I'm going to guess that it was a hit when it was originally released. It was certainly a hit during the VHS boom because the film has grown to become a cult favorite among many people. This here is basically another take off on THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT as a group of young women are terrorized by some maniacs and must try and find a way to survive. This genre had been done to death throughout the 1970s and to me this here isn't a good film.

The problem with this movie is that it's just too tame for its own good. Yes there's some nudity when the girls are forced to take their clothes off but there's really nothing overly violent or shocking here. Perhaps had there not been dozens of these types of films then this one would have come off better but when the genre is so full it's hard to make your mark and that's the problem here. The idea of the schoolgirls being attacked by the biker boys is something that could have worked but there just aren't enough good moments in the film.

It's basically the same thing over and over. They are held hostage. One tries to escape. There's a chase. Another one tries to escape. There's another chase. This pretty much happens throughout the running time and it grows rather tiresome after a while. The cast are certainly entertaining enough and King makes for a nice bad guy. The problem, again, is that there's just nothing here that makes the film stand out in a popular genre.

You should know what you're going to get from this low-cost midnight drive-in schlock that represents the sleaze and sadism in a decade of scuzzy low-brow exploitation. It gets all the ticks of being raw, gritty and sordid. Yes, it's rough around the edges and director Earl Barton's minimal handling makes sure it works to its strengths, and surprisingly strikes up a bit of tension, and unease. However it couldn't escape that cheesy daftness, which loomed largely by its repetitively funky and racy music score. It was quite an unusual one though, which doesn't always fit in. The shallow story is plain and simple, if a little meandering from time to time and few senseless occurrences are hard to believe. I don't know how many opportunities arose to escape, or do something, but everyone seemed happy to sit and watch. While the obvious script starts off awkwardly and melodramatic, it then gains control and builds tension. Sure it isn't first-rate, but it holds your interest and includes a surprise or two. Performances are workable enough. Zalman King terrifically chews it up as the menacingly neurotic loon biker, that along with his brother (played placidly by Robert Porter) go onto terrorise a small group of teenage school girls (Cathy Worthington, Dina Ousley, Susie Russell and Jill Voight pull off their parts), teacher (a fiery Brenda Fogarty), and a fellow biker (a fine Robert Gribbin) in the forlorn California desert. Due to the relaxed pacing, it gives you time to soak up the situation and the harshly captured bare-desert backdrop that complements the bare-knuckle survival tag. Then it pulls out the punches, and ups the notch. Some of the action scenes are over-the-top, and corny but amusing. The cruel violence is sexually scathing, and nasty. While we see little flesh, the leering camera-work focuses on the scummy side of things, and can get up within the action.

That bad… not that bad. Definitely nothing special though, but the intensely bold theatrical turn of King makes it worth-a-peek.

Stranded during a bus tour of the remote California countryside, a feisty teacher and her small group of sexy teenage students become the terrified targets of two nasty bikers who are intent on rape and murder.

Whilst Trip With the Teacher might not be the all-out sleaze-fest that the above short synopsis suggests, there is still enough gratuitous nudity (from most of the girls), well handled action, and nasty violence to ensure that fans of low-to-no-budget 70s exploitation flicks should not be too disappointed.

Director Earl Barton certainly keeps things moving along at a brisk pace with his no-nonsense direction, and the cast all put in solid performances for this kind of fare, with Zalman King (future producer of soft-core porn) being particularly memorable as the more unhinged of the two bad-guys. His portrayal of deadly nut-job Al brings to mind David Hess's Krug from The Last House on the Left: a cold, heartless killer whose capacity for cruelty knows no bounds. As the film progresses he goes from merely menacing (in his bug-eye wraparound shades), to total psychotic lunatic—complete with facial ticks, incoherent rambling, and uncontrollable outbursts of violence.

Pete (Robert Porter), Al's brother, isn't quite such a reprehensible fellow, but he just can't say no to his degenerate sibling. So when Al starts to rape and kill, good ol' Pete joins in, rather than upset his li'l bro'.

Fortunately for the trapped teenagers and their teacher, a third biker, Jay (who joined the brothers on the road after helping them fix a tyre), turns out to be a nice guy, and risks his life to save them from their plight.

As I write, Trip With The Teacher has an IMDb rating of 1.4, which is a downright tragedy. The film might be nasty, cheap and sometimes plain silly (the reappearance of a character who is presumed dead is particularly daft), but it's always entertaining. Don't watch this film expecting slick visuals and Oscar winning acting; enjoy it for what it is—a raw piece of 'drive-in' style 'trash'.

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.