Wrong Way

The original pre-cert videotape of this changes hands for crazy money these days, it's very very rare. I was 'fortunate' enough to get hold of a DVD-R of this, as it sounded right up my street...

And the verdict?.....Jeeez! As noted previously, this is definitely "inspired" by 'Last House On The Left" but the tone is totally different. It's proper early-70s rough-ass grindhouse business, sexist as hell, dumb, with sub-porno standard acting. It's not disturbing in the slightest however, and whilst the subject matter (rape rape and more rape) is nasty, the way it's done is just funny. The soundtrack is absolutely wild - incoherent hippy wailing over acoustic guitar meandering, you couldn't make it up, honestly. Has to be heard to be believed.

This is a great period piece...the work of anonymous drunken old hacks exploiting the hippy counterculture. God knows who any of the people involved in this are, but hell, I'd be fascinated to know how and why a movie like this came about. Worth seeing to sate your curiosity...this film is one of a kind. It is DEFINITELY bad though.

As far as I am aware, I Spit On Your Grave holds the ignominious record for the longest rape scene ever committed to celluloid, but Wrong Way doesn't exactly hold back either: the film's two young victims, Nancy and Cathy, are passed between several lank-haired, drug-crazed drop-outs for so long that I was amazed they were able to walk away afterwards. It's such a ridiculously drawn-out scene that it ultimately loses the power to shock.

Left in the middle of nowhere, their clothes tattered and torn, Cathy and Nancy proceed to wander aimlessly through the countryside, eventually seeking help from a group of hippies, unaware that these potential saviours are in fact a murderous Manson-like cult who are in the process of burying a body. The hippies take the girls hostage and abuse them further. Meanwhile, the local police comb the area for the missing teenagers.

The film then abruptly turns its attention to a totally unconnected pair of villains holed up in a cabin who have a hostage of their own, a pretty woman who they've got drugged up on heroin. After forcing her to have sex, they bind and gag her and shove her in the trunk of their car. Before they can drive away, the police arrive on the scene and a shootout occurs. The film then wraps things up in a matter of seconds by showing the killer hippies being arrested/shot and Cathy and Nancy being freed.

Needless to say, Wrong Way is pure exploitation: the film's tasteless content, grainy photography, reprehensible villains, and no-frills direction positively screams grindhouse, while it's gritty low budget aesthetic and unflinching scenes of degradation have seen it compared to Last House On The Left. But whereas I Spit On Your Grave and Last House justified the graphic depiction of sexual violence with a healthy dose of brutal revenge, Wrong Way does nothing of the sort, making it seem even more exploitative as a result. This is z-grade trash that simply revels in abuse; it has all the technical competence of a roughie, but with none of the hard-core content (there is, however, full frontal nudity from both sexes, and lots of shots of male butts, one of which is a worrying shade of green!).

5/10. Utterly deplorable and completely amateurish misogynistic nonsense, so inept and outrageous that fans of all things exploitation will simply have to see it to believe it.

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.

This is the type of movie you get when giving a camera to a bunch of drunken fat guys that watched way too much porno in their lives. They presumably intended to make their very own imitation of Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" with aggressive sex scenes and violent revenge-action, only they only got around filming the sex footage and completely forgot about the action. Two young girls, surprisingly cute-looking and sympathetic, are picked up by bored rednecks and brought to a remote place where they get raped and beaten for hours! It's unbelievable how LONG these rape sequences last! Viagra must have been popular in the early 70's already. When the dirty beer-drinking & pot-smoking farmers have finally satisfied their lusts, the girls try to get back to civilization on foot but – sadly for them – they get captured by a pathetic hippie-cult, led by what unquestionably must be THE most annoying guy I've ever seen. The agony of this film ends with two totally unrelated characters having sex with a prostitute in a sleazy motel room. Who the hell are those people??? Just in case you still have doubts, "Wrong Way" should NOT be watched by anyone who still has some good taste left in him/her. The absolute low point was when the camera zoomed in on the girls as they were washing their vagina after being raped several times. At that point, I was really wondering why I was still watching this crap. The editing is lousy and the choice of music couldn't be more wrong. None of the cast members starred in another movie ever again and that's probably for the best. Rating 2 out of 10; a point for the girls each because I honestly felt sorry for them.

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.