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 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.

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.

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.

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.