Hot Summer Week

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.

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!

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.