“If that’s Charles Bronson, ask him if his tallywacker wants some poontang!”

For that line alone, I stayed with this movie.

If you ever wondered what Grease would look like if it were shot in a weekend by people who primarily worked in the adult industry, Patrick Wright’s Hollywood High is your answer. Wright, a man usually cast as “Large Truck Driver #2” in exploitation flicks, takes the director’s chair here to deliver a disjointed, sun-drenched, and largely topless day in the life of the most delinquent students in Tinseltown.

Jan (Susanne Severeid, Don’t Answer the Phone) Candy (Sherry Hardin, Ten Violent Women), Monica (Rae Sperling) and Bebe (Marcy Albrecht) spend most of this movie topless and smoking the stickiest of the icky with Frasier Mendoza, hooking up with the Fenz (Kevin Mead; guess who he’s supposed to be) and Buzz (Joseph Butcher, not far removed from playing the latter side of Bigfoot and Wildboy), hanging out with sex symbol of the past June East (yes, Mae West, but played by Marla Winters), having classes with stereotype teachers like the mincing Mr. Flowers (Hy Pyke, Grandpa from Hack-O-Lantern) and the overly horny Miss Crotch (Kress Hytes) when they’re not being chased by a cop, who they eventually hit with a watermelon and take his pants off, revealing that he’s wearing lingerie.

Turner Classic Movies notes the existence of an unrelated 30-minute television pilot, also debuting in 1977, for a prospective series. It featured Annie Potts and aired as part of NBC’s Comedy Time.  It also spawned an unrelated sequel (Hollywood High 2), proving that there is always a market for teens in trouble as long as the cast remains unencumbered by shirts.

For the film historians hiding among the exploitation fans, there is one genuine highlight: a crisp, 1970s shot of the Cinerama Dome in its prime. It’s a brief moment of architectural dignity in a movie that otherwise features people stealing pants and smoking out of makeshift bongs.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before the internet made celebrity downfall a 24-hour commodity, there was Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. First published in the U.S. in 1965 and promptly banned for a decade, the book was a psychedelic fever dream of Tinseltown’s “true” history. When it finally returned to shelves in 1975, it brought with it the grisly receipts: the mangled wreckage of Jayne Mansfield’s Buick, the tragic stillness of Carole Landis, and the horrific, bisected remains of Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia).

Anger, a filmmaker and devotee of Aleister Crowley, viewed Hollywood through an occult lens, popularizing the quote “Every man and every woman is a star.” He traded in urban legends like a currency: Clara Bow and the entire USC football team (including a young John Wayne) or the myth of Mansfield’s decapitation. Most of it was debunked long ago, but as the saying goes: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The book led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players, if not the rubbers, because they all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be, and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

Yet for fans of 70s exploitation, the cast is a who’s who of the era’s “it” girls. Uschi Digard—the queen of the Super-Vixens—is present, which for many viewers is the only endorsement needed. You also get Jane Ailyson (The Godson and A Clock Work Blue taking the whip and Suzanne Fields (Dale Ardor from  Flesh Gordon) lighting up a party scene.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become its very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom of Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance,” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There is a masterpiece to be made from Anger’s book, a surrealist, high-budget exploration of the dark energy beneath the palm trees. Ideally, Anger himself would have directed it. Instead, we have this: a rare specimen of a movie that contains all the ingredients for a riotous time: scandal, nudity, and historical blasphemy.

Yet somehow manages to be a bit of a slog. It is a “Babylonian orgy” that feels more like a long afternoon at a dusty swap meet.

If you’re looking for the exact moment the “Summer of Love” curdled into a ditch of despair, look no further than this output from the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Beverly and Fred Sebastian. The same pair that gave us the swampy vengeance of ’Gator Bait and the heavy-metal slasher Rocktober Blood decided to take a stab at social relevance and, in typical Sebastian fashion, they used a rusted scalpel.

The film stars Misty Rowe (the bubbly blonde icon from Hee-Haw) as Maggie, a small-town girl who discovers she’s pregnant and decides that running away is her only prenatal plan. She quickly trades her rural innocence for the asphalt jungle, falling in with a group of hippies who are less about peace and love and more about crime.

What are they living for? To finance a school bus and live their nomadic dream.

How are they gonna do it? By seducing and robbing truck drivers.

For the first half, it plays like a lighthearted road movie with lots of flashing panties to secure rides and the kind of carefree hitchhiking montages that make you forget the era was actually crawling with serial killers. But then, at the switch of a reel, the vibes are assaulted by a gruesome, back-alley abortion scene. It’s a jarring, visceral sequence that feels like it belongs in a completely different film, designed to shock the audience out of their seats (or backseat, if they’re still watching). By the final act, our fun hippy family has gone the way of Manson, as the social consciousness remembers that it’s in an exploitation film.

Somewhere in here, there was a good movie, but the Sebastians aren’t the people to make it. I mean, they try to make a message movie while all we want are frolicking moments of stealing cash from truckers and making it on the road.

I guess in a way, this is a very realistic film about the seventies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

PS: Thanks to Alan for noticing I had the wrong poster art.

“Did you mean to review Amos Sefer’s The Hitchhiker which is known as An American Hippie in Israel? Either the photo for the review for The Hitchhikers is wrong or you reviewed the wrong film. You have no credibility. Bad enough you plagiarizer copy from everywhere with click bait visual vengeance buy now posts. Now images that dont go with the film.”

Thanks!