Summer 2022 marks the 55th anniversary of Roger Corman‘s The Trip. The 1967 drama launched a craze for acid films with frenetically edited and arbitrarily censored panoramas of free love and terrible dreams; Psych-Out (Richard Rush, 1968), Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968), and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) are among the best. Predictably, few of these films run longer than 90 minutes. You can only gape at trippy celluloid for so long. Regardless, with a renewed cinematic interest in the late-’60s zeitgeist over the past few years—see My Generation (David Batty, 2017), Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), and Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021)—this drugsploitation pioneer is more relevant than ever. Corman’s film of peace, love, and a superficially normalized subversion of social and political mores still leaves a warm taste in the mouth.
It goes like this: Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a Hollywood ad director with a pair of clean sideburns and cleaner chinos, is too alienated to remember to sign divorce papers at the behest of his wife Sally (Susan Strasberg), clad in a nauseating shade of pink suit with a husky lilt to her voice. He repairs to the hilltop manse of John (Bruce Dern)—a kahuna-type in tenure-track tweed and a goatee—wanting to trip under his watch. Paul tells a blonde named Glenn (Salli Sachse, from American International Pictures’ beach party flicks) that he’s looking to understand himself. He scores 250 micrograms of LSD from Max (Dennis Hopper), a dealer in a hemp poncho loaded with HIPPIE POWER buttons, donkey beads, and teeth of ambiguous origin. For the next 70-minutes, he reels through a half-hallucinated haze of sex, death, and Lovecraftian fantasy.