Pick-Up

It’s not that often anymore when I see a film that has no real bearing on anything else I’ve ever seen before, and so I treasure such films perhaps more than I really should. All the same, when I picked up the 8 pack of films in the Drive-In Classics set, I was expecting the typical drive-in routine of tits and violence, and while this certainly delivered on that, I was not expecting such a completely insane story.

The story, what there is of it, concerns a guy driving a mobile home across Florida, and picks up two girls along the way. They all get lost in a series of road detours, and somehow get stuck in a swamp in the Everglades. The guy and one of the girls fall in love, while the second girl keeps hallucinating about Greek mythology and vicious clowns and politicians appearing in the swamp. Then there’s an abrupt Easy Rider-ish ending that is every bit as out of place as Easy Rider’s was.

This doesn’t sound like all that much, granted, and it really isn’t, but the film works in spite of itself due to its cheerful ignorance of any kind of coherency or sanity. The acting of the girls and of the man that keeps calling them on the mobile home’s phone starts over the top and works its way from there to a more hysterical fever pitch. It certainly helps that both of the women are quite lovely (based on the average level of attractiveness of the women in, say, the films from the Tomb of Terrors collection, I’d have to say it was easier to find attractive women willing to be naked on film back in the 70s than it is today) and are willing to show themselves off at a moment’s notice. Each character is also given their own flashback, so that we can properly sympathize with their positions as poor, misunderstood hippies, as if that is somehow going to make any of them suddenly make sense. One of the girls is running around with a stuffed animal and goes into wild dances at a moment’s notice, the other is obsessed with Tarot cards and the Zodiac, and hallucinates constantly, and the guy loves being stranded and lost in a swamp because he’s finally no longer afraid of anything, and a couple flashbacks are supposed to make all of this coherent? Come on now.

Still, the silliness is a large part of why I enjoyed this, and if this wasn’t a particularly great film, it was at least a nice lead-in to the rest of the collection. I can only hope the remaining seven movies will be at least as good as this one was.

Rating: **