Is this a home movie from the sixties? For some of us, this is our past and for many of you it is only history. Our travelers travel and find New Orleans even if you, in 2006, might have trouble getting to it across the toxic swamps. They find Karen Black when she, too, seems almost too young to be the almost-star she becomes. But she is young and pretty and one of two prostitutes from a New Orleans house of pleasure and they drop acid that has been saved to trip in the cemetery with the angels.
There is more movie and more memories of those times. The secret now, in 2006, is to put a DVD in the machine and head off in the time machine to the blue highway past. It has its weaknesses but it never slows. It has its moments of brilliance but never becomes a classic movie, just a cult classic, and still it is a piece of movie history. If you haven't been there, pull up an armchair bike and, if you have, come back to the past.
IMDb rated it 7.2 out of 10. Everyone reviewing has a new scale. I give it 78 grooves out of 100 possible — which makes it a groovy movie. It was well-done for its time. Sadly, it has not aged very well. It is a great period piece but not a classic except in my life as part of our collective 1960s consciousness.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Now that this is an Editors' Pick , I have to berate myself for one horrible error. Peter Fonda's father did not act in It's A Wonderful Life. That was Jimmy Stewart and I should have been awake and thinking instead of playing the keyboard and dreaming of old days -- good and not.
2 - SHARK
Nice piece.
I had one major problem with the movie: implying that America's PROBLEM could be simplified/symbolized by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck was sort of a WASTED opportunity --
although I also had a scary confrontation (as a longhair [on the road] at a small cafe in Amarillo, Texas).
What's funny is: nowadays, many small-town texas cowboys have long hair and a meth lab out behind the barn. My, how things change!
Also note: a few years ago, AmericanExpress had a commercial featuring Peter Fonda; at the end, it showed, "Member since 1965" or some-such early date -- which means our counter-culture socialist anarchist dope-smoking "hero" was carrying a friggin' American Express card at the height of the revolution!
: )