Wrong Way

On paper Wrong Way should be a winner. Two girls have a car breakdown and get repeatedly raped, anti-climax, the end. Nothing but pure unadulterated exploitation in a brisk 77 odd minutes with a significant portion taken up by ultra sleazy soft-core rape, its a real shame that it ends up so darned boring. Ineptly shot and edited with dire acting but the worst thing of all is that the assorted butt ugly males have more nudity than the lovely girls. That's like, the biggest mistake a film like this can possibly make, its a total, profoundly asinine misjudgement of the target audience that could always seem like intentional subversion were it not for the fact that nothing here really feels intentional at all. On the other hand, one of the guys asses has a weird grayish green look to it like he's turning into a zombie from the buttcrack up, which kinda made me chuckle. Also, one of them is called Crabs because he apparently got them when he let one of his buddies give him head, and another likes to eat raw eggs to somehow improve his sexual prowess. So there's a bit of off key weirdness floating through this one to ease the disinterest and it has some effect, but not generally enough. I actually pretty much zoned out for a good deal of the viewing, spent more time pondering it's makers and their purpose, the moods of the actors and the unfinished seeming plot construction. Given that this came out in the same year as Last House on the Left its possible that it was cynically rushed out as a quickie rip off, making it something of a suitably ignoble godfather to the works of The Asylum. But maybe it was made independently, which could almost make it a pre hardcore precursor to the many great roughies of the decade, except that hardcore flicks had already turned legal so there was absolutely no reason not to go down that route. Almost certainly some combination of booze and hate was behind this, and I would wonder cocaine as well were the budget not so low. And did any of the actors care, even a little about proceedings? I've an inkling they were probably jobbing porno performers, but then the rapes are so lifeless and poorly handled it would seem they had not even a smidgen of professional pride. Meh, I still feel kinda sorry for them, I actually love seeing degradation on camera but this whole film was just lame, so lame in fact that just writing about it makes me dislike it even more than I did when I watched it just a couple of days ago. The only conceivably reason to watch this is if you happen to be some kind of rapesploitation cinema historian, everyone else should steer far clear.

This is a very rare film that you're not likely to ever get your hands onto. It was released about 20 years ago on VHS in England. Those were the days before the BBFC so it was not censored in any way.

The film is about two girls who are on their way home but after taking a shortcut their car brakes down. They end up asking a bunch of dope-smoking hippies for help but end up getting raped in every sexual position imaginable for nearly 20 minutes of the running time! After the all the hippies have had their way they leave them to themselves. So they decide to wander off and look for help. However they stumble upon a crazy cult of yet more evil people who want to "reduce them to sexual beasts" before killing them. All this time a police investigation is on its way, triggered by the anxious father of one of the girls. And there is even a completely unnecessary and unrelated side-story about two villains who want to smuggle a drugged girl across the Mexican border to sell her to a brothel - but not before raping her themselves ...

As you can probably tell from this summary, this is sexploitation at its best (or worst, depending on your point of view). There is no hardcore sex in this film but almost 50 per cent of the running time has various girls getting raped over and over again. I wasn't able to take any of it seriously so I wasn't offended in the least but consider yourself warned. More than once this all but lost film reminded me of Meir Zarchi's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. Only that I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE had more plot and less sex.

With so much nudity on display, maybe I should talk about how the actors look? Well, I thought the girls were all quite beautiful in a very 70ies way, meaning no implants and no plastic surgery. But the men ... Now, I can enjoy a naked guy as much as a naked girl but when they are all about 50 years old, obese, beer-bellied and sporting greasy hair and silly mustaches I get turned off. I guess that was the point as it further accentuates the violation of these girls and I should probably be glad that I wasn't aroused by overlong scenes of rape but sometimes it was just painful.

The acting is amateurish and the same goes for the directing and editing. And the music is just weird ... it is mostly made up of dreamy folk-pop songs! It's crazy and often extremely out of place. I'd say it is not such a bad thing that this film has faded into obscurity right after its release. In fact the sole reason that I enjoyed it a little bit was that I had to hunt it down and search for it. I get a kick out of watching films almost nobody else has ever seen. In the end you've to decide for yourself it is worth the effort.

This early 70's movie is sometimes compared to "Last House on the Left" (made the same year) because it is also about two young girls who run afoul of a group of vicious hippie criminals after their truck breaks down on a rural country road. One of the girls has concerned parents as in "Last House", and the local police mount a slow and generally ineffective search for them (although in "Last House" the police are SUPPOSED to be inept,comic buffoons--I'm not so sure here). But "Last House on the Left", as low-budget as it was, has things like character development and an actual plot, including a revenge sequence at the end modeled on Ingemar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring". I doubt the people who made this thing had ever even HEARD of Ingemar Bergman.

It would be easy to brand this movie as misogynist since it has several LONG--and, in one case, completely gratuitous--rape scenes where the women are stripped bare and forced to service multiple male partners. But it might be giving this movie too much credit to assume it has any kind of anti-feminist or anti-female agenda. The only agenda here is obviously to turn on viewers who are into rough, "non-consensual" sex. That would certainly include actual rapists, but it would also include people who might be into rough play-acting and even some women who might indulge in rape fantasies now and then. Because where "Last House" is a realistically violent film and is often genuinely disturbing, this film is just ridiculous and completely impossible to take seriously on any level.

There are a couple points of interest though. One of the actresses playing the two protagonists MIGHT be the later 70's porn star Rene Bond. She looks a little different with long blonde hair instead of short brown hair and--if it IS her--she still has her original breasts. (But whether she is Rene Bond or not, her name is probably not "Laurel Canyon" or "Candy Sweet" as the two actresses are listed in the credits). There's also an interesting sequence when the girls are let go by their first group of attackers and they stumble across a Manson Family-like group who are burying a dead body while an actual toddler wanders around! The leader of the group stands out as a hammy dinner-theater actor in an entire cast of complete NON-actors. He alternately threatens to make the girls serve as babysitters and sex slaves, but then before anything happens, the movie cuts away to a completely irrelevant scene with some peripheral characters quasi-raping another drugged out girl in a motel room. The denouement with the original protagonists is delivered after that, entirely in a voice-over by the police as the filmmakers either ran out of money or were simply not interested in any aspects of the "plot" that DIDN'T involve some kind of sexual violation. This movie is obviously nothing but pure, unadulterated exploitation.

Usually, I love this sort of film...but Wrong Way just doesn't cut it. The influence from Wes Craven's classic The Last House on the Left is clear and obvious throughout, but the film doesn't do anything new with it and overall is really rather boring. The Last House on the Left inspired a number of rape and revenge films; the majority of which hailed from Italy and are rather good if you're into this sort of stuff. That's what makes Wrong Way all the more disappointing; it's not a bad thing to rip off Craven's film, but when all you've got is a series of sex scenes, you know that it hasn't been done well. The plot is virtually non-existent, and simply focuses on a couple of girls that end up being raped and abused by a few bored hippies. The film is notorious for its rape scenes that go on seemingly forever, but it gets old fast. I have no problem with sex in movies, and in fact actively seek out this sort of dirty, grisly film...but there really is no reason to bother seeking out Wrong Way. It's currently unavailable in Britain, and that certainly isn't a bad thing.

It is really astonishing when one thinks that, unlike today, there actually was a movie-making climate which allowed for films like Wrong Way to be made and put in real movie theaters. This is an astonishingly bad film but it is a fascinating example of early 70's sleaze no doubt.

Two very pretty girls take the "wrong way" which is a short cut, their car breaks down, two hippies come along in their truck to give them a ride to help, but take them to their other hippie friends instead. They rape the girls repeatedly in the middle of nowhere until finally letting them go, where the girls then meet other crazies who rape them too. Stick in a very mild police investigation and, for the hell of it out of nowhere, toss in some drug runners who have sex with another pretty girl and there's the movie.

The group of hippies that rape the girls first are an amazingly sleazy bunch. Beer bellies, greasy hair, all unattractive, a total nightmare for any woman. They also are real "backwoods" and that's scary in itself. For instance, one (named "Crabs" I think) keeps scratching his groin, then complains to another that he got that itch after he let the other guy "suck" him. Ouch! The "acting" (especially by the two girls, who give it their best) is hilarious, but the rape scenes are truly wonders to behold. When the hippies rape the girls, you see much more of the men's ugly bodies than the girls. One guy's butt is even green! The rape lasts a very long time, with cheesy folk guitar music playing in the background. Before the rape, we even see another group of hippies hanging around who are against raping the girls, but a shotgun held by the leader chases them away.

Then later on for seemingly no reason, two ugly drug runners have sex with a very pretty drugged out girl, in another overlong scene. It all ends soon after in a quick "resolution" to the "plot."

Of course Wrong Way is a horrible movie. It's not even that much fun to watch. But you can't take your eyes off it.