Wild in the Streets

Wild in the Streets (1968)

[Not really]
Trash-o-rama

Exploitation flick about a young musician (Christopher Jones) who direspects his elders but eventually becomes President of the States. A sort of paranoid fantasy dreamed up by a bunch of sad old people who are, evidently, scared shitless of anyone under 30.

Anyway, I was sort of looking forward to this movie for some reason. I guess I was expecting a lot more people to get wasted than actually did. I was hoping for people walking down the street with UZIs blowing old people away. It was sort of disappointing.

And painfully dull. Oh my God. It just goes on and on, going into the agonizing details of the guy's rise in the political world (but not enough detail for it to make sense). It was like watching the US campaign trail on fuckin CNN, only marginally more interesting because, well, there were music videos. And the actors were slightly better looking than most politicians (although not by much, excepting Richard Pryor and Hal Holbrook, who was relatively very young in the movie).

So, like, nothing really happens for a very very long time. I think I spent most of the movie looking up the ages of the director and writer (old) and talking about Sgt. Pepper and The Yardbirds with Mr. Blue. Because this movie was lame. Shelley Winters was sort of entertaining as dude's mother, but not enough to make the movie interesting.

Granted, things do pick up in about the last fifteen minutes and the movie does end on a sort of high note. Once he becomes Prezident, dude rounds up everybody over thirty five and puts them in these special camps where they are all jacked up on LSD and left to run around in purple togas. Cool. They should start doing that for real. That would be awesome.

Also, the music was fucking awful. Made me want to die.

END

Directed by: Barry Shear. Written by: Robert Thom. Starring: Christopher Jones, Shelley Winters, Hal Holbrook, Diane Varsi, Richard Pryor, Ed Begeley.