Trip With The Teacher

Rape/revenge films are like junk-food: you either eat it or you don’t. Me? I love the stuff. The movies, I mean. There are few things in life that make me happier than seeing a woman taking violent revenge after going through hell. So I’ve been watching a lot of them lately, in hopes of being able to make one of my own, and in my search I got this particular piece of trash, from the early seventies. The story involves a group of girls who are going on a bus with their teacher to learn about rocks or something, who knows who cares. On their way they meet a couple of bikers, two bad and one good. The baddest one, played by softcore porn master Zalman King (The Red Shoe Diaries, Wild Orchid), a narcoleptic psychopath who kills people just for talking shit to them. They capture the bus, and start raping the girls and the teacher. But enough is enough, and the girls (and the good biker) decide to take action against the assholes. Well, you know what that leaves into. This is a grindhouse movie in it’s most basic sense of the word. The atmosphere is grimy and gritty, and you can even see the sweat fall off the face of the actors, with it’s low budget. The movie is surprisingly un-sexy, which is very rare in rape/revenge films. Of course, there’s nothing sexy about the rape scene in Irreversible, but other than that most rape scenes are pretty good to jerk off to, thanks to the fact that they look mostly fake. This movie is no exception, as the rape is actually off-screen (that of the teacher). There is some t&a but none of it is really that nice, although to be honest I thought the teacher, played by Brenda Fogerty. I wish I had good-looking teachers like that when I was in school. The main saving grace of this film is Zalman King, who is so good at playing a psychopath that it’s a tragedy that he didn’t act as much as he directs. He’s conniving, sleazy, and just plain evil, screaming and nodding, and his weird laugh just makes things even more unnerving. He would go on to play a good guy in the LSD horror movie Blue Sunshine and played one of the astronauts in Galaxy of Terror before finding his vocation in bad sex cinema. What a tragedy, he could have been better than David Hess. Although he did recently come back in the previously-reviewed Saint Francis, so I’m hoping he’ll make a full acting comeback. This isn’t a great film but it sure has it’s share of sleaziness and filthiness, and for that it comes highly recommended.