Roger Corman, you beautiful bastard! Only he would produce this 1970 dark comedy about a hippies in an apocalypse. You read every word of that sentence correctly and if you questioned any of you, you need to watch more Roger Corman films.
This movie is just too crazy for me not to go into details so please enjoy these spoiler ahead.
The film opens with crudely animated military personnel declaring their new biological weapon then cuts to a live action chase between a hippie carrying a crossbow and a cop. The hippie, Coel (not a typo), is a bit of a Bugs Bunny character changing into priest robes instantly and throwing off everyone with one-liners like “for your penance [for police brutality] you will teach bicycle safety at the Black Panther Convention in Mobile, Alabama”. Coel meets Cilla, a mistress/assistant of a famous scientist named Dr. Murder who has created a gas that kills anyone over the 25 by speeding up the aging process. The government unleashed the gas on accident and the world is left to be run by people who aren’t even old enough to rent a car. Two factions rise up, the pot-smoking hippies and the academic preppies. And that’s just in the first ten minutes. The alternate title of the movie is Gas! - or- It-Became-Necessary-to-Destroy-the-World-in-Order-to-Save-It so I think you can guess where this is going. Everyone (both factions) decide to just party while everything goes to hell and young fascists take over.
Despite many set-backs, Cilla and Coel stay pretty chipper as they travel the country meeting odd characters and looki- Holy crap! Is that Ben Vereen! Apparently, this was his second film role as Carlos the paranoid revolutionary whose very pregnant and very spacey girlfriend Marissa is a music fanatic - Oh hey! Marissa is Cindy Williams (Shirley from Laverne and Shirley). Also popping up are Bud Cort (from Harold and Maude and M.A.S.H.), Talia Coppola aka Shire (ADRIAN! from Rocky and The Godfather), and Raye Birk (that balding character actor from all the Naked Gun films). Anyway, the six people are in search of a non-violent commune in the New Mexico desert to settle down in.
Everything is sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll until the group discovers a town terrorized by football players in dune buggies. Primary colored dune buggies - think along the lines of Power Rangers zords. The football players are really rather triggering as they enslave, torture, and assault others while using sports jargon. This is followed by a prepubescent doctor, a very insistent flasher, a group of clueless rapists, lost Texas Ranger, a community of patriotic bikers in golf carts, and a group of Native Americans demanding that while people take Columbus Day back. Oh and God gets involved in the story too.
Why is this movie in this blog? Because the magnificent entity the group keeps meeting on the road none other than Edgar Allan Poe . . . on a motorcycle . . . with a modernly dressed “Lenore” on the back. He warns the group of doom and gloom, using his own stories as analogies for bewaring mankind’s “wickedness”. Oh, and he has a fake raven pinned to his shoulder. Why? Why not! Do not question the Corman!
