Trip with the Teacher (1975)

Why so much hype?

Undescribable Perfection

ridiculous rating

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The heyday of the drive in began with low budget horror flicks and eventually morphed into low budget T&A movies. The films almost always took on some form of profession from student nurses to cheerleaders to teachers. Surprisingly while the titles may have made it seem that those in these chosen professions had the loosest of morals the films themselves actually were a bit more twisted. Yes, the characters were placed in definite misogynistic settings but they were also the most independent women on the planet. In the end while bad things happened they came out stronger, more self-aware and better off than their male counterparts.All of that can be seen in TRIP WITH THE TEACHER. The name itself sounds like a low grade porn flick but it is far from it. The movie features a teacher on a field trip with a group of female students. Their destination is the desert area of the southwest. Side by side with their adventure is a motorcyclist who teams up with two other young bikers, brothers, one of which has a flat. What he doesn't realize is that one of them tends to lean towards anti-social psychopathic tendencies.Their paths cross as they pass the bus and the girls flirt with them. When both end up at the next gas station they chat, the girls flirt some more and then head out on their way. Al (Zalman King), the psycho brother, kills the station attendant who was giving them a hard time without telling the other two, and their on their way.The girl's bus breaks down and the cyclists offer to help them. At least they claim to. Instead they kill the driver, assault the girls and eventually rape the teacher who offers herself up if they'll leave the girls alone. The third biker isn't part of this and is attacked by the brothers and left for dead. Now if only the girls can find a way to escape.The movie features everything that those drive in movies looked for. We have sexy young girls, none of which looks under 25 even though they're playing teens. We have psycho bikers because hey, all bikers must be psychos right? Well with the exception of the one riding the old style motorcycle. We have a secluded location which works out great since the budget is miniscule at best. And the end result involves a form of revenge which was a classic plot device in these films.The movie looks much like it would have on the large whitewashed screens of the drive in with little attention paid to focus or a decent film stock that would have provided a better picture. But these movies weren't made as art. They were quickly written, quickly shot no budget films that made back more than their investment playing from one end of the country to another. This one is a bit less than most which makes me think it was the second half of a double bill along the way.The acting is high school level at best. Like I said, no one seems to fit the age that they are portraying. King always seemed to play characters like this one so his showing up here allows the audience to know right off the start he's the bad guy. His is the only character that really stands out here seeming like a method actor looking for some method to play the part.With all that being said this is another of the films saved by Vinegar Syndrome. No, this isn't CITIZEN KANE in that it deserves major restoration and placed in a locked vault. But the movie itself depicts the type of film being made when it was released, a style of film made specifically for drive ins. The film company behind it, Crown International Pictures, was a company that made tons of movies for drive ins. They may not have been the best of the best but their history deserves to be preserved.Vinegar Syndrome is presenting the film in the best way possible with plenty of extras on hand. To begin with the film is a 2k restoration from a 16mm original camera negative. There is a commentary track with director Earl Barton, actress Cathy Worthington and actress Dina Ousley, TAKING THE TRIP a video with actress Brenda Fogarty who plays the teacher, multiple TV spots, a still gallery and reversible cover artwork.If you're a fan of drive in or grindhouse films then this is yet another film to add to your collection.

Four teenage girls and their lady-teacher crossing the desert on a strictly educational tour of ancient America. And a couple of bikers whose minds seem to be on something rather less edifying. It sounds like a recipe for a porn film, though if you want nudity and explicit sex, you'll be disappointed. But don't worry, there's still enough gratuitous violence and sadism to shock your parents. Because that's the level we're at - basically schoolboy fantasy.The little group is faced with everybody's worst desert nightmare, a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, little guessing that the nightmares have hardly started. The two bikers seem rather like the Kray Twins of 60's London, one totally mad (in sci-fi-bug wraparound sunglasses), egging-on a more placid brother. Soon they pull up beside the minibus, and offer to tow it to the service-station. But instead they abduct their captives to a deserted house, where they inflict unspeakable humiliations on them.None of the four girls carry any conviction whatever, except at the scream-queen moments. Even at the beginning, when it's mostly small-talk, they seem to be reading the lines, not playing them. And imprisoned in the house of horrors, they just sit there like guests at a dull party. We know that one of them is meant to be openly randy, and a second one is a puritan virgin. But the other two could be tailors' dummies, for all we discover about them. Brenda Fogarty as the teacher puts a bit more into it, but they missed their chance to cast a proper schoolmarm fantasy-figure. Fogarty just looks like the girl next door.And more faults, perhaps not worth lingering-on. Countless missed opportunities for the girls to escape. The teacher eventually killing the villain by running him through with an iron bar, not too feasible really. Some unsubtle feeding-in of loud birdsong, as though we'd forgotten we were in the wilds. And a terrible ending, with ghostly stuck-on grins by the survivors.Zalman King as the mad brother is the power behind the film, and he went on to become quite a well-known writer/director. At a time when the exploits of Charles Manson were still vivid in the American mind, King seems to have been trying to replicate those wild mood-swings - snarling savagery one moment, spaced-out mumbling the next.Good enough for 16-year old boys, longing to listen-in on girlie-talk and fantasizing about power of life and death over five vulnerable females.

Let me assure you, I love watching bad movies, especially sleazy bad movies. As a pseudo-intellectual movie snob, nothing's more fun than 'slumming it' after watching a Coen brothers masterpiece.All that said, I can't enjoy this movie. It's not the graphic nature of the film, as the psychotic maniac 'Al' is hilarious in his attempts to appear menacing, especially while wearing his HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE sunglasses. He's equal parts funny and sleazy, making him a modern day 'Mack the Knife'.So why can I only give the movie a 5/10? Because with the sole exception of 'Creeping Terror', there has never been a movie where the victims in the film did less to save themselves. It goes beyond cowering in fear, and even stupidity. Hell, even the female equivalents of Forrest Gump would've known enough to all run away simultaneously in opposite directions.It doesn't matter if the villains are fully distracted, completely stoned, unarmed, or even asleep, the women in the film literally do nothing to escape. Hell, the villains didn't even tie them up! The villains don't even have guns or anything, so if every girl grabbed a large wooden stick, that'd pretty much be it for the bad guys.If you want to see a movie where a group of young women hang around, slightly bored, patiently waiting to each be raped and killed, then this is the movie for you.As for me, it's no surprise that the movie fails to be good, but it's shocking that it even fails as sleaze.

Watch Trip with the Teacher with a big, whiskey-soaked grain of salt: it's a grindhouse flick, not really a drive-in flick as advertised with its most recent DVD release. Earl Barton knew what he was doing, he was shooting a story that is filled with lots of real good vs evil characters (with maybe one that at one point is kind of gray-area), where good is good and pure and innocent and evil is just flat out f***ing deranged. Even the print on the recent DVD release compliments the picture: it's scratchy, faded, there's a few frames here and there that are just missing or cut out of a scene of dialog or action. It's not meant to be some great movie, but for what it's worth it's a lot of fun and it also takes its sadistic characters as seriously as possible.Here's the premise: a bus of schoolgirls lead by Miss Tenny to seek out some mountains or something (who cares really, it's just some place in the middle of the desert) are harassed, gingerly at first and then not-so-much, by a couple of greasy bikers (Zalman King as one of them, distinctive with his alien-sized sunglasses) who catch them at a weak spot- their bus breaks down and need a lift. They're taken to a cabin even more in the middle of nowhere, and various rape and murder is then set as the bikers' task. As with other movies of this ilk, not just exploitation in general but more specifically with bikers, there's one good biker in the trio who tries to save the women from certain destruction. But it won't be that easy... in fact, for a large chunk of the running time, Trip with the Teacher is almost as sadistic in nature as Last House on the Left.Except, in the case of the film-making, it's a lot more skillful and entertaining, with dialog that sounds so trashy you'd hope it was ripped out of text books of high-schoolers (there's one line from a girl about being raised by the bible that's a riot). And there's also Zalman King, who plays one of the sickest, most deliciously wicked and insane villains of the 70s. Strange that a man who is touted for his work on soft-core porn could actually pull out a convincing performance: it's at first seemingly hammed-up, but it's really vicious in that way that's memorable. The rest of the acting ranges from decent to forgettable (two of the girls barely utter a word of dialog for the bulk of the time spent at the cabin), but why carp? Anyone watching Trip with the Teacher is watching it for one thing above all else: skillfully directed trash.It's better than it has any right to be, but that goes without saying that it knows what it is: this is like one of the rare good pieces of movie-lore that inspired Tarantino and Rodriguez with their pictures: it's unrepentant in its conventions and split of black-and-white, and it's played out to its full extent.