18th April 2008: Jack Nicholson in the Philippines double!

Flight To Fury

USA/Philippines 1964 b&w

aka Cordillera

Director Monte Hellman Story Monte Hellman, Fred Roos Screenplay Jack Nicholson

Cast Dewey Martin (Joe Gaines), Jack Nicholson (Jay Wickham), Fay Spain (Destiny Cooper), Vic Diaz (Lorgren), Joseph Estrada (Garuda)

Welcome to a return visit to the Philippines with your tour guide Jack Nicholson. Tonight’s Schlock Treatment features two movies shot back-to-back in 1964 with a very young Nicholson and maverick director Monte Hellman. Nicholson was already an aspiring writer, not to mention hungry actor, and had collaborated with Hellman a number of times, notably on the notorious Roger Corman quickie The Terror (1963) on which a total of five directors worked, with only Corman receiving credit. Executive Producer Robert Lippert watched The Terror and, stunned by its sheer economy but completely in the dark over which filmmaker did what, asked for either Francis Ford Coppola or Monte Hellman to make his next two pictures in South East Asia. Coppola was busy, so Hellman got the job; he took a slow boat to Manila alongside a busy Jack Nicholson who was hammering out the script for Flight To Fury, and John Hackett attempting to nail the second feature Back Door To Hell. Of course Coppola would end up in the Philippines recreating a small corner of hell with Apocalypse Now, but that’s another story altogether…

Under the watchful eye of Lippert’s producer Fred Roos, Hellman shot both films starting with Back Door To Hell with, predictably, very little money, a back-breaking schedule and the inherent chaos of the Philippines to contend with. Not surprisingly Hellman fell deathly ill with an unnamed tropical malady and was unable to supervise the first cut of Back Door… while almost dying daily on the set of Flight To Fury. As a result, Hellman has little to say about his low-rent Philippines adventures, but it does explain the grit, grime and purposeful nihilism in every frame. Add Nicholson’s memorable dialogue and a growing awareness of his strengths as an actor, and you have two perfect low-budget, almost no-budget, micro-masterpieces.

First tonight is Flight To Fury from a script by Nicholson, who wrote himself the role of antagonist. The film’s protagonist is Joe Gaines (Dewey Martin), a penniless American drifter in South East Asia cadging drinks off fellow American Jay Wickham (Nicholson), self-professed bad luck Jonah and card carrying nihilist. A chance meeting with the aloof beauty Lai Ling Forsythe leaves one dead body and Gaines on the next plane out of the country along with Wickham, slimy businessman Vincent Lorgrin (Vic Diaz), and blonde companion Destiny Cooper (Fay Spain).

Characters, secrets, murky motives and a subplot of missing diamonds are set up before the plane crashes wiping out several passengers and forces the survivors to make their way through the hostile environment battling the anonymous jungle, their own mistrust, and a group of bandidos led by the sleazy, lecherous Garuda, played by future Philippines president Joseph Estrada. The veteren of almost 200 Tagalog films, curiously this is his only English language film, as his small but utterly memorable role is the only one in the cast to match the greasiness of the venerable Vic Diaz.

Nicholson, of course, is the Creator of Flight To Fury’s paranoid microcosmos and, as such, gives himself the most intriguing character and the film's best lines ("Are you interested in death?"). In typical Filipino fashion, the film’s co-producer Eddie Romero and frequent collaborator Mike Parsons made a local version called Cordillera after the American cast left, using local actors and his own Tagalog script. In a country where 90% of their film history has not survived, this version has not surprisingly disappeared forever. But we are left with the Nicholson/Hellman version, perhaps the finest moment from their combined early careers: the 1964 Flight To Fury.

Back Door To Hell

USA/Philippines 1964 b&w

Director Monte Hellman Writers Richard A. Guttman, John Hackett

Cast Jimmie Rodgers (Lt. Craig), Jack Nicholson (Burnett), John Hackett (Jersey), Annabelle Huggins (Maria)

Now to our second film, Back Door To Hell, a taut World War 2 drama with a similar look to the other b&w war films made in the Philippines at the time by Eddie Romero and American B actor George Montgomery. Unlike those films, however, there’s no rousing gung-ho speeches here; it's made clear from the start these men, much like the director himself and Francis Ford Coppola after him, are slowly falling to pieces in the Filipino jungle. The Apocalypse starts now.

Hellman plunges straight into the action: Lietenant Craig (Jimmie Rodgers) is US Army Intelligence leading a small band of troops towards a Japanese radio tower to broadcast vital information to the invading forces about to recapture the Philippines. Compared to his forceful appearance in Flight To Fury, Jack Nicholson is sorely wasted here as Rodger's second banana playing the sardonic St Burnett, a foil for the relatively spoulless killing machine Sgt Jersey (co-writer John Hackett). Naturally they get the most meaningful exchanges…

Jersey: "We're all gonna die anyway - tomorrow, next week, 30 years from now. Did that little thought ever penetrate your thick skull?"

Burnett: "Yeah, once when I was a boy, but naturally I dismissed it as being too outrageous."

The American guerrillas team up with Paco, an embittered Filipino resistance fighter whose survival insticts lead him to mistrust both sides; tired of sacrificing his men for his liberators, he's introduced as the man who has tortured Rodgers' contact to death, just in case... In fact, torture is Paco’s preferred modus operandi, as evidenced by his treatment of captured Japanese Captain played by Joe Sison (Filipino goon, also in Eddie Romero and George Montgomery exports). "Interrogating a prisoner is like cooking a goose..." says Paco, almost salivating at the prospect.

Stripped of most of its military hardware and pyrotechnics, the film is more a claustrophobic deconstruction of a war film, an exercise in rapid-fire montage filled with simple, cost-effective visuals and quiet flourishes (an incredible 360 degree pan from the Japanese Captain's point of view) and a modest character study of men pushed to the brink. The tacked-on newsreel footage towards the end showing the liberation of Luzon, inserted against Hellman’s wishes by the distributor to make the film more “war-like”, is unwelcome and gratuitous.

Surprisingly good in his role as Lieutenant Craig is Jimmie Rodgers, the easygoing folk-rock singer who had a mildly successful career until a drunken incident with a policeman in 1967 left him with a fractured skull and a legacy of brain-related complications. Hellman would eventually recover from his harrowing Philippines experiences and collaborate with Nicholson once again on two westerns, Ride In The Whirlwind and The Shooting, which can only be described as "existential". Well, the same term can be applied here: the existential wartime action of Back Door To Hell.

29th February 2008: Drugs and Bikers Counterculture double!

The Rebel Rousers

USA 1967 [released 1970] colour

Director Martin B. Cohen Writers Martin B. Cohen, Michael Kars

Cast Cameron Mitchell (Paul Collier), Bruce Dern (J.J. Weston), Diane Ladd (Karen), Jack Nicholson (Bunny), Harry [Dean] Stanton (Randolph Halverson), John 'Bud' Cardos (Townsfolk)

Welcome to our Counterculture special on Schlock Treatment – hippies, bikers, and surly Mexicans all vie for screen time in a three hour non-stop sticking it to the Man-a-thon.

The Rebel Rousers is a prime example of biker nastiness from 1967. There were biker films before – The Wild One with Marlon Brando, Russ Meyer’s Motorpsycho – but Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels from 1966 cemented the genre, and for the next five or six years there were scores of them, while square audiences got their kicks vicariously. Usually told from the biker’s point of view, it’s about frontier freedom, with all the inbuilt philosophical flaws and inconsistencies, and the genre found its zenith in Easy Rider – Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper representing the Death of the American Dream, and Jack Nicholson as a booze-soaked lawyer providing the running commentary.

The Rebel Rousers is a different breed, told mostly from the point of view of Paul Collier (Cameron Mitchell), a Joe Sixpack architect who chases his pregnant girlfriend to a sleepy coastal town, and runs into former football team member JJ (Bruce Dern), now gone to seed and cracking skulls with his biker gang the Rebel Rousers. JJ says it’s all about doing his own thing, being “where it’s at” and other well-meaning hippie aphorisms, but the other gang members including the stripy-panted Bunny (Jack Nicholson) are after much darker kicks, and drag Paul and his girlfriend Karen (Diane Ladd) from their stalled car for a round of Beach Blanket Bingo. After almost constant bickering, like petulant children with ADHD, JJ agrees to a bike race along the beach to see who scores the pregnant Diane Ladd for the night. Sure, he’s a biker with a conscience, but pragmatism rules their bizarre universe.

Filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970, Rebel Rousers is the Last House On The Left of biker movies, switching between grimness, absurdity and soap operatics with alarming regularity. Without the visual flair of Roger Corman, and minus the fuzztone squall of Davie Allan and the Arrows, it’s a fairly anonymous effort that just happens to have an outstanding cast: Nicholson, of course, perched on cusp of stardom after 10 years of juvenile delinquent and biker films; Harry Dean Stanton, already in his forties, playing an aging delinquent with his usual slurred genius; and Bruce Dern, a staple of the biker genre whose narrow features lend themselves perfectly to his sneaky anti-social weasel characters. The Rebel Rousers also marks the first screen appearance of Laura Dern inside the very pregnant Diane Ladd, Dern’s then-wife, both of whom were obviously shagging like rabbits on the set of The Wild Angels.

As Peter Fonda says in The Wild Angels, “We wanna be free to ride our machines and not get hassled by the Man… and we wanna get loaded!” Amen to that brother, as we fire up the hogs on Fonda’s fussin’, feudin’ cousins The Rebel Rousers.

Acapulco Gold

USA 1973 colour

Director Bob Grosvenor

Our next film was a campus favourite in the Seventies, a pot fetishist’s sticky dream. In the filmmakers’ own words, Acapulco Gold from 1973 is a “modern-day adventure” telling the inside story on the marihuana trade – the growing, harvesting and smuggling of the VERY illegal wacky weed. I still remember posters for this outside the Classic Cinema and the Boomerang right up until the early 90s, proving old hippies never die – they just can’t remember what they’ve watched. Ideal viewing conditions for Acapulco Gold would be in the old Schonell Cinema in the mid 70s, the air sticky with green smoke, listening to the collective roar every time a particularly bushy plant tickles the audience’s fancy.

While the film protests (a little too strongly) that it’s impartial, it quickly turns into a comprehensive how-to manual for budding entrepreneurs; all that’s missing from the picture is Cheech and Chong’s marijuana van from Up In Smoke (now THAT’s how you smuggle pot into the States!). There’s tips on concentrating THC with dry ice and how to swim past the border patrol, and you find the going rate in Acapulco, the “superweed” capital of the world, is just $30 a kilo. “Out of sight!” mutters our gringo smuggler from under his headband, and then from out of nowhere a vaguely Robert Crumb-esque cartoon sequence kicks in amidst a sea of animated pot clouds. Crazy. On a brief detour to revisit the hemp trade of the Twenties, grizzled old-timers and oblivious Oakies compete for screen time with hipster doofusses (or is that doofii?), all of whom are decked out in a staggering array of Seventies garb.

Make no mistake, this is pornography for potheads, and if you don’t believe me, check out the opening’s shots of a fresh-faced nature girl wandering through a field of marijuana, picking sticky buds instead of flower buds. By avoiding the hysterical preachy moralizing of drug scare films like Reefer Madness it swings the other way into canonizing its subjects, the seemingly endless talking heads of anonymous stoners. Personally I suspect the filmmakers are a little fond of the “reefer” as interviews go on far longer than a non-THC addled brain can handle. And I swear, if I hear the words “out of sight” one more time there will be hippie blood on my hands.

Technically as raw as a two-day orgy and with a soundtrack by perennial head favourites The Flying Burrito Brothers and a nation of Neil Young pretenders, it’s a trip back to a time no doubt long forgotten by all concerned: the 1973 head film Acapulco Gold.

8th February 2008: Roger Corman's The Quick And The Cheap!

Attack Of The Crab Monsters

USA 1957 b&w

Director Roger Corman Writer Charles B. Griffith

Cast Richard Garland (Dale Drewer), Pamela Duncan (Dr. Martha 'Marti' Hunter), Russell Johnson (Hank Chapman), Leslie Bradley (Dr. Karl Weigand), Mel Welles (Jules Deveroux)

Here at Schlock Treatment we’ve attempted to a write an intro in less time than it takes to make a Roger Corman quickie. After three days toiling away on the keyboard, it appears we’ve beaten the master… but only just…

First for Corman tonight is a creature feature from the Golden Age of Cold War Terrors: the 1957 Attack Of The Crab Monsters. A group of scientists and two navy schmoes land on a seemingly barren Pacific island to check the effects of radiation from recent atom bomb blast. The first group disappeared without trace, but strangely enough their voices can still be heard in the labyrinth of tunnels white-anting the island. There’s no animals left on the island other than gulls, crabs (cough) and traces of mutant earthworms. And then there’s the 50 foot pits that are ANYthing but worm holes…

It’s all there in the title, and yet the literate script from Corman’s regular scribe Charles Griffith keeps the crackpot revelations till near the very end. For a formulaic Fifties creature feature it’s neatly compact and certainly doesn’t waste any time plunging the audience into its post-nuclear landscape of despair; its vaguely apocalyptic feel is augmented by quoting suitably grim passages from the Bible, and existential angst from the French scientist-cum-philosopher Dr Jules Deveroux, played with garlic-scented aplomb by veteran character actor and Corman alumni Mel Welles. The surprise in the cast is Russell Johnson aka The Professor from Gilligan’s Island, who no doubt is doing his scientific training on a deserted island learning how to make a radio out of coconuts AND how to keep his bunk mates crab-free.

It’s a turbulent 70 minute ride, as cracked as a crab shell in a New England restaurant. B-monster fans rejoice as we lower ourselves into the tank for Roger Corman’s Attack Of The Crab Monsters.

The Terror

USA 1963 colour

Director Roger Corman Writers Leo Gordon, Jack Hill

Cast Boris Karloff (Baron Von Leppe), Jack Nicholson (Lt. Andre Duvalier), Sandra Knight (Helene), “Richard”/Dick Miller (Stefan), Dorothy Neumann (Katrina), Jonathan Haze (Gustaf)

Our second Corman quickie tonight is the most threadbare Corman production of all, the 1963 horror film The Terror starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. Of all of Corman’s cheapies this one takes the crown: one in which he cut every possible corner to finish the shoot in less than four days.

The Terror comes from a prolific period for Corman in which his Edgar Allen Poe series was in full swing. House Of Usher, The Pit And The Pendulum, Tales Of Terror… he was grinding them out one after the other for American International Pictures. At the end of his shoot for The Raven, Corman decided he could shoot a second picture using the same set and its two leads, horror heavyweight Boris Karloff and a young and relatively green Jack Nicholson. Corman was more than just a B auteur at this point; after nearly ten years writing, directing, producing and distributing his own films, he was a virtual one-man studio. And to grease the wheels, he surrounded himself with a stunning support team of young, hungry cineastes – Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill - all of whom would later emerge as idiosyncratic auteurs in their own right.

And so Corman started at breakneck speed to film Karloff without a script on the rag-ends of the Raven, with Coppola, Hellman, Hill and even Jack Nicholson doing second unit direction some time later. Nicholson plays a French soldier estranged from his platoon during the Napoleonic Wars, rescued from the furious Baltic seas by the mysterious figure of Helene (Sandra Knight) who may also be dragging him to his doom. She disappears almost as quickly as she appears, leading the confused and bedraggled Nicholson to the crumbling castle of Baron Von Leppe (Karloff). A broken figure tormented by his past misdeeds, he believes he is haunted by the spirit of his dead wife Ilsa, whose portrait looms over his sitting room, and whose features resemble the elusive Helene.

And so begins a tale of madness, possession, tragedy and retribution, in a film that feels more like an abstract student exercise in montage than a regulation AIP shocker. Corman’s regular dogsbodies Dick Miller (Bucket Of Blood) and Jonathan Haze (Seymour in Little Shop Of Horrors) round out the threadbare cast dominated by Karloff who, with little more than three pages of dialogue to motivate him, plays the elder statesman of horror to the hilt, while Jack Nicholson is a suitably downbeat foil. Nicholson would spend the next few years acting and writing for Monte Hellman, while Coppola would finish his three year tenure with Corman and graduated to larger studio projects. Only Jack Hill was destined to remain with Corman on and off for the next twenty years as a B-film director, albeit a GREAT B-film director.

The fact that The Terror can stand on its own legs as a gothic horror companion to the Poe series is testament to the talent in front of and behind the camera. An almost seamless patchwork of disparate footage, including shots from Corman’s Poe films (Von Leppe’s castle is stolen from The Pit And The Pendulum), its legend in exploitation circles is as strong as Karloff’s formidable presence. We are proud to present Corman at his cheapest AND quickest with the 1963 The Terror.

14th September 2007: Roger Corman's Beatnik double!

A Bucket of Blood

USA 1959 b&w

Director/Producer Roger Corman Writer Charles B. Griffith

Cast Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), Barboura Morris (Carla), Antony Carbone (Leonard de Santis), Julian Burton (Maxwell H. Brock), Bruno VeSota (Art Collector)

We’ve often paid tribute to the King of B films, the Sheikh of the Shoetring himself, Roger Corman. Out of all of Corman’s notorious quickies, and God knows we’ve played a few, these are two of the best, starting with a demented slice of Beatnik kitsch, his 1959 A Bucket Of Blood.

Dick Miller, Corman’s regular schmoe in supporting roles, is note-perfect as Walter, a nebbish mop boy at local beatnik coffee house The Yellow Door, populated with a variety of boho’s and bozos attempting to outdo each other in the “far out” stakes. Tired of being ignored and, like all would-be artists, desperate to impress a young girl named Carla, Walter sets out to prove that “Art” is not just short for “Arthur”; an unfortunate accident leads to his first inadvertent masterpiece “Dead Cat With Knife”, and in no time he’s hailed as the Silent Voice of Creation. Desperate to keep up his instant pretentiousness, he looks around his shabby apartment for another subject – “Dog Nailed To Table”, “Cockroach Stuck To Coffee Cup”, that kind of thing – but a drug bust for “horse… junk… white stuff…” leads him to desperate measures, and before you can say “Narc Meets Frying Pan”, the undercover cop is the latest artistic triumph at The Yellow Door.

Overnight, Walter goes from coffee house flunky to applause junky in one foul move, and he plays the artist role to the hilt, complete with beret and air of self-importance, and a knack of taking the line, “If you’re not creative, you should be dead” to outrageous lengths. The coffee shop owner’s keeping schtum whilst making a killing in the art market, as critics hail Walter’s work as a “return to Realism”, noting “he knows how his anatomy”. Walter’s clay-covered corpses are viewed as hideous yet somehow profound, their contorted features an existential portrait of Man’s eternal suffering in a Godless universe – or some nonsense.

“Crazy… crazy,” Walter admits, and he’s spot-on, thanks to a supremely witty script by Charles B. Griffith loaded with sharply observed satire, and compact direction from Corman. Beatniks, bongos and berets are easy targets (The Beverly Hillbillies, anyone?), but Corman and Griffith stay on the right side of caricature, and was successful enough a formula to rework into their next picture together, the original Little Shop Of Horrors, coming up later tonight. Meanwhile it’s time to put the “art” into “party movie” and fill up a bucket – with punch, of course! – for the 1959 A Bucket Of Blood.

The Little Shop Of Horrors

USA 1960 b&w

Director Roger Corman Writer Charles B. Griffith

Cast Jonathan Haze (Seymour Krelboin), Jackie Joseph (Audrey Fulquard), Mel Welles (Gravis Mushnik), Dick Miller (Burson Fouch), Jack Nicholson (Wilbur Force)

In 1986 I was in high school on the Sunshine Coast. Like every testosterone-driven sixteen year old I dutifully trooped along to the stage-musical-turned-comedy film The Little Shop Of Horrors about a man-eating plant named Audrey 2 hoping to catch a glimpse of foliage, and I suspect I was the only nerdy teenager who walked out of the cinema saying, “Meh! I liked Corman’s original better.” No wonder I didn’t go on any dates until final year uni (sigh….)

Twenty one years later I still stand by that assessment. Roger Corman’s 1960 Little Shop Of Horrors is a one-of-a-kind black comedy micro-classic, a cheaper-than-cheap attempt to cultivate genius out of – well, blood and bone fertilizer. Introduced with clipped Dragnet-style narration, it’s the tale of a failing flower shop on Skid Row, its very Yiddish owner Mushnik and his schlepping assistant Seymour. As a final resort to keep his job, Seymour breeds an odd mutant weed and names it Audrey 2 after Mushnik’s cute daughter, much to the horror of Seymour’s bedbound hypochondriac mother, who insists he play around a little, or at least until she’s in an iron lung.

Soon Audrey 2 has filled the store – literally - and is a sensation, and a quietly impressed Mushnik can’t keep up with demand. But Audrey 2’s growing at an exponential rate and Seymour’s discovered it’s a Venus Fly Trap that needs human flies. Its insatiable taste for blood leads Seymour to feed it body parts – whether it’s any old body lying around, or one he has to procure from scratch. “Feeeeeed meeeeeeeee!” Audrey, I know how you feel! Who do you have to blow to get a bagel round here? Oy, I’m schvitzing like a mentsch right here…

Little Shop… reunites director Corman with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith in virtually a less deadpan and more deliberately cartoonish rewrite of their previous hit A Bucket Of Blood (1959), with the flower shop standing in for the coffee shop, and the man-eating plant for Walter’s clay-covered corpses. Dick Miller (A Bucket Of Blood’s Walter) has a cameo as a compulsive flower muncher, alongside a VERY young Jack Nicholson as a dental patient with a pain fetish. Sure, the remake is flashier AND it’s a musical, and its singing plant sounds like Rick James, but the original has its own unique and indefinable charms. Presenting the first, the best, the cheapest: 1960’s The Little Shop Of Horrors.

5th January 2007: Youth Gone Wild double!

The Fast And The Furious

USA 1955 b&w

Directors John Ireland, Edward Sampson Producer/Story Roger Corman Screenplay Jean Howell, Jerome Odlum

Cast John Ireland (Frank Webster), Dorothy Malone (Connie Adair), Bruce Carlisle (Faber), Iris Adrian (Waitress), Bruno VeSota (Truck Driver), Roger Corman (State Trooper), Jonathan Haze (Connie’s Rescuer)

Hey Daddy-Os, and welcome to a special Schlock Treatment double feature of “Youth Gone Wild”, even if the star of tonight’s first feature is pushing middle age! John Ireland, a Hollywood actor specializing in playing assholes, is true to type in the 1954 film The Fast And The Furious - here he kidnaps a waitress (played by Dorothy Malone) at gunpoint, carjacks a Jaguar, and then endlessly bickers with Malone on a wild cross-country chase with the highway patrol and some very irate racing officials.

Forget the 2001 film of the same name - the 1954 Fast And The Furious is the product of the fevered imagination of the King of the Drive-Ins, Roger Corman. This was one of his first films as writer and producer and is characteristic of his over-400 film output: small, compact genre films that work perfectly within their budgetary restrictions, with fantastic dialogue and action scenes, cherrypicking the best elements of road movies, film noir and the burgeoning Juvenile Delinquent film popularized by Marlon Brando’s The Wild One.

Corman sold his film to ARC, a company that would later become American International Pictures, his employer for over 10 years and the undisputed moguls of the drive-in circuit. Throw in a few familiar AIP faces like Bruno VeSota and Jonathan Haze, a great jazz score by the doomed Chet Baker and even a cameo from Corman himself as a state trooper, and you are truly looking at B-grade cinema history.

The Wild Ride

USA 1960 b&w

aka Velocity

Director Harvey Berman Story Burt Topper Screenplay Ann Porter, Marion Rothman

Cast Jack Nicholson (Johnny Varron), Georgianna Carter (Nancy), Robert Bean (Dave), Carol Bigby

From The Fast And The Furious to The Turtle and The Tortoise - second on our “Youth Gone Wild” double feature is the 1960 Juvenile Delinquent film (or “JD” film as it’s more affectionately known), The Wild Ride, featuring Jack Nicholson before he started shaving and became one of the reigning sovereigns of the post-JD biker genre (Hells Angels On Wheels, Rebel Rousers).

Nicholson made his film debut two years before in the title role of the Roger Corman-produced Cry Baby Killer, and in the same year as The Wild Ride did an impressive cameo in Corman’s black comedy masterpiece Little Shop Of Horrors as a masochist dental patient. Certainly Nicholson did some of his best work for Corman in the Sixties before hitting the big time in the biker film benchmark Easy Rider in 1969.

Back to The Wild Ride, which is clearly NOT a Corman film. Nicholson was on loan to a film which is the living, breathing embodiment of the term “B picture” - its grainy black and white footage clocks in at under an hour with a no-name cast (apart from Nicholson) and crew, and is destined for eternal damnation as the bottom (as in “bottom of the barrel”) of a drive-in double. The film is more a case of “Youth Gone Mild” - Nicholson and his cop-hating gang of misfits indulge in some enjoyably anti-social silliness which never really gets that nasty, and the car action sequences fail to set the screen on fire. But the spectacle of an almost fetal Jack-Baby spouting the best pseudo-beat dialogue this side of High School Confidential is more than enough reason to experience for yourself The Wild Ride.