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.