Psych-Out (1968)

One of my all time favorites.

Just perfect...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Hilarious exploitation film! As someone who's been a hippie and around hippies all his life, I can tell you that this movie is more dead on than many would like to admit. Anyone who says otherwise really hasn't been around hardcore hippies, or just isn't being honest with themselves! LOL This movie gets a star just for the great line that I used as my title.I love how members of Mumblin' Jim stop playing, but the music track keeps going. I love how Jack Nickleson's creepy performance may not seem so peace and love, but is representative of a lot of the hustlers who have always populated the hippie scene. I love the beginning of the film where people form a parade following some chick carrying a flag representing a chair. I love the funeral scene with the Seeds, the cheesy hipster slang, and the ridiculous "in the scene/out of the scene" game. Of course this movie is a typical AIP mash up, but who cares? Kick back, gobble whatever sugarcubes you have, and have fun.

This cool, little movie (directed by Richard Rush of Stunt Man fame) stars Susan Strasberg (good actress; daughter of Lee); she hung out with all these cool nobodies (then) as a deaf chick on Haight_Ashbury streets looking for her older brother (Bruce Dern as the Seeker). This is a YEAR befor Easy Rider (a great movie) and the plot just rolls in a exploitive-psychelic Roger Corman way that's totally the perfect drive-in movie that is not a realistic hippie, 60's, whatever statement) for 1968. Dean Stockwell plays the cool, cynical head-band dude, Nicholson is Stoney, the level-headed pot-head guitar player, Max Julien as mr. intense, Henry Jaglom as the "artist" and The Strawberry Alarm Clock" first hit single (with a real plot) on location, and then Bruce Dern later in the film, while Strasberg carries the story (deaf); It's totally cool. I assume everybody hip as scene this Universal film by now, no matter what you're into.Check this flick (It blows away The Wild Angels and other cool exploitation films by the youth movement, even then);along with Hell's Angels on Wheels (Jack Nicholson and Sabrina Scharf - from Easy Rider) as one of the few films made on the Haight - realism would come later; like a year later because of Hopper, Fonda and, well ...you know.

I purchased this movie recently as one of those "MIDNITE MOVIES", that MGM has put out as a double feature on DVD. I absolutely love this movie. If you want to know what 1968 looked like, really looked like in the hippie world at that time, this movie is for you!Some people might think it's a bad movie, or corny. Well, it's 1968, when people acted more like philosophers than the arrogant, ignorant "HEY YO" types of today. I would much rather have the former than the latter. In my opinion, 1968 was the Best of times, and the Worst of times. We had Vietnam, the end of the Johnson era, and the beginning of the Nixon-Agnew regime. (and those were the good old days!) There was the young people's movement on College Campuses, War Protestation, Untimely demises of leaders such as Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. What was once a small exclusive lifestyle in San Francisco California blossomed into a lifestyle for this country and the entire world ultimately. It was the movements of the mid-late 1960's that still fuel us today!!!Jack Nicholson classes up any movie, and he does so here! I love Susan Strasberg, and there are many other great young actors. Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell, Adam Rourke, to name a few. The music is mostly by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and there is a scene called "The Beads of Innocence" that you shouldn't miss!!! The Colors, the Sounds, the Lights! It's all good!So if you are in a mellow mood to tune in and trip out, then Psych Out is your movie! I give it a full five stars! Loved it!

Psych-Out is as much a skewed look at the world of hippies as much as it is a praise-full one- Clark knew that he couldn't show hippies as they really were, despite that he could get filming rights in Haight-Ashbury and other sections of San Francisco, but hey if you're not going for realism, go for ciche! And what ciche it is: Strausberg is a deaf runaway looking in San Fran for her brother, played by Bruce Dern (a near Jesus look-a-like), named the Seeker, and yet instead falls in with a psychadelic rock group called Mumblin Jim, headed by Stoney, Jack Nicholson in a pre-Easy Rider look. The plot is used as a thread to showcase various cliched scenes; the pad filled with hippie-people, the acid-freak out, the scuffle with the fuzz (one of which a young Garry Marhsall), the scuffle with the regular folk, and the music scenes, one of which is a abhorrition on Hendrix's Purple Haze (it's the opening chords played backwards!). Yet, I can reccomend this movie to nostagia-fanatics, ex-hippie film buffs, and for those who'd like to see Nicholson before he started making money in Hollywood, and this is not saying he's bad in this, he's quite good considering the tripe of a screenplay. Another small plus is Kovacs on photography.And hey, don't forget the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the seeds! B