5 Awesomely Psychotronic films on Amazon Prime can Prepare YOU for the coming of TRUMPMERICA!

Even casual Americans will soon be called to bear witness to what promises to be the most bizarre elections in the history of our democracy, the battle between the mighty Donald, his hair Reichstag-fiery as he struts before his throng, and a woman. How did America get to this? The drive-in knows. That's where it all started, whatever it is, and it's been slithering up from those tawdry mosquito-covered screens, across the abandoned strip mall Blockbusters and up through Amazon Prime, waiting, for you! Presuming you have it (and if not, you should), will you walk tall, sit proud, and watch the skies... in HD?

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Switch it off or turn to STONE!

These five films remind us that feminism was once called women's lib and didn't preclude gratuitous unsafe sex, that diversity was once called black power and didn't preclude pimp strutting, and peace peace activism was once called a lot of radical hippie nonsense. Groovy, groovy times man.

I curated this list from Prime it's got the most and coolest niche pyschotronic cast-offs, even if 90% of their vast library is crap, cropped, or corny. It's worth digging anyway, if you have the right guide, some madman who likes to sink his hand into the muddy mire, but has a jeweler's eye for hidden sparkle and would only recommend things in anamorphic ratio!



Never one to miss a chance for collateral production value, Corman utilized still standing Hello Dolly! period piece sets, docudrama procedural storytelling, punchy vibrancy, and a wryly iconic narration from the great Paul Frees. What a cast: Alex Rocco, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, John Agar, and Studs "Lloyd the bartender" Turkel in bit mobster parts; Jason Robards, way-too-tall to be Capone, but plenty feral; Ralph Meeker a good-natured, slightly slovenly Bugs Moran; George Segal, a key provocateur in heating up the war between the North and South sides. The sexy Jean Hale (below) is the only major female character-- and her knockabout brawl with Segal is a funny, over-the-top centerpiece that provides a nice break from the boardrooms and hit planning without dragging on forever. And of course... there's Dick Miller. The print Amazon's been streaming is HD perfection.

Trump Factor: Check Robards' eyes in this shot above, as he prepares to 'fire an apprentice.'

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Corman's final film as a director, it's a countercultural 'comedy' (written by George MIAMI BLUES Armitage) wherein a military poison gas kills everyone over thirty, lifting the world out of the button-down conservative repression of the older generations and into some kind of San Francisco guerrilla theater troupe / Firesign Theater post-apocalyptic wild west. Across this wasteland and empty Main Streets wanders a ragtag love-seeking group in search of a thriving commune they hear about on the radio, in Mexico! They run into all sorts of tangles and 60s sociopolitical roadside attractions as they bop their way across the great Southwest. The most successfully realized episodes involving a deranged but charismatic college football star quarterback who's dissolved the already flimsy difference between a college football team and a bunch of rape-and-pillaging thugs; and a pack of bikers who have taken over a golf course/country club and turned it into a microcosm of bootstrap economic hopes and dreams. Edgar Allen Poe and Lenore and their pet raven watch from high on the hill making lofty comments, as does God (offscreen) in a New York Jewish accent. Oy vey!

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You can hear Johnny Depp stirring in his day care center nap room.

What really dates GAS-S-S badly though are the Country Joe and the Fish music-set montages of dune buggy chases (the kind Keystone Cop crap the Beatles did in HARD DAYS NIGHT and THE MONKEES did every week on TV)  and the soft focus light show coupling, which were quite old hat, and almost square, man, by 1971, and especially as the lead 'lover' is not very charismatic, so the sexual freedom thing just casts a skeevy vibe. Or maybe I'm getting old.

That all said, the Biker golf club and football marauder sections expertly straddle the difference between CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Firesign Theater's WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM, and Terry Southern-style savagery-as-American-policy deadpan jet black pep talks ala DR. STRANGELOVE (which GAS-S-S clearly emulates with its alternate title "How it became necessary to destroy the world in order to save it.") and CANDY (1968). Like ORANGE, the football rape and loot practice sequences are genuinely anarchic, far more so than, say, the doctors shouting "Kill! Kill!" during their own game in the much more favorably reviewed M*A*S*H (1970). If it stayed at that dark comic level, Corman's film would fit right next to Godard's WEEKEND (1967) or Malle's BLACK MOON (1975) in its absurdist assault on the cinematic conventions of bourgeois patriarchy. It might be blind to its own (what they called back then) male chauvinism, but it's also realistic about the difficulty of staying peaceful and nonviolent when your community is threatened by an invading malevolent force. (BILLY JACK had made a tidy bundle that same year) and actually finds a solution far more radical than just kung fu or hiring seven samurai.

Trump Factor: Several of the eccentrics the gang run into on their journey pontificate in political bluster underneath which you can read plenty of gangster-like insanity. The "free-spirited independents trying to make peace with those still clinging to the crumbling mantle of hetero-white-Christian-male authority" aspect is more relevant than ever (if we're to believe TV). Based on all those Trump rally disruptions, it's a lesson the once-loving left has clearly forgotten, if indeed they ever learned it all, outside of that hippie chick who put that one flower in that guard's gun in that picture...

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An early roller in the 70s' lady roller derby phase (Raquel Welch's KANSAS CITY BOMBER, from the same year) this is a fine example of what I've just now termed 'libsploitation,' i.e. relating how much sexual harassment a hot mess athlete has to put up with in the lowdown world of bloodsport while at the same time taking full leering locker room privilege. Luckily super brawler Claudia Jennings was always up for both aspects. When the violence and hypocrisy gets too much, she bashes the team owner over the head with her trophy and goes on a parking lot rampage. Anyone who was a kid in the 70s has a 'soft' spot for this type of film, for it's drive-in gold- w/ a plot you can follow just by listening in at the next car's speakerbox while trying to find your way to the snack bar after ten whiskies. And I love badly choreographed fights, where it's clear everyone's pulling their punches, the way I used to fight with my brother and neighborhood kids, where if someone throws a slow motion punch at you, you're duty bound to react (exaggeratedly) as if you'd been socked hard for real, also in slow motion. For we had grown up watching BATMAN after school then running out to the yard to play fight and shout BAM! BIFF! POW!


If that kind of thing doesn't grab you, there's more going on: Claudia Jennings once again brings the glint of genuine madness to her feral character, and rolls with the orgiastic vibe all the way into legend.

TRUMP-Factor. - Crass, blunt, effective and all about turning a public event into a shouting match for the sake of ratings and whipping up the blood frenzy in rowdy audiences. Claudia Jennings character says and does anything she feels like and her managers can't argue since her outrageous behavior gets her in the news, i.e. no such thing as bad publicity. As her momentum builds her rivals become more and more abusive, and the crowds more and more infused with bloodlust.

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Clik here to view.The crowning plume on Italy's The Omen / Close Encounters imitation helmet, this tale of a telekinetic devil child caught in a bidding war between ancient alien forces has nearly everything that made the 70s great. John Huston plays God (AKA Jerzy Colsowicz) coming to Earth to round up evil Katy (Paige Conner) for his heavenly astral kindergarten. And since its a 70s devil movie it's packed with an ensemble cast of aging stars and future cult icons: Joanne Nail (who rocked it so very, very hard in Switchblade Sisters) is Barbara, the mom with the cosmic womb; Lance Henriksen is her boyfriend, pressured by his Satanic board of directors (headed by Mel Ferrer) to get her pregnant again because it was still the 70s so the antichrist couldn't be a woman. Glen Ford is a suspicious detective killed by Katy's peregrine falcon familiar; Shelly Winters is the astrology-guided housekeeper; Sam Peckinpah (!) Nail's abortionist ex-husband. When Barbara resists Henriksen's pro-marital overtures, the Illuminati arrange an alien abduction to artificially inseminate her! Man oh man! Nick Redfern must love this movie! If that wasn't 70s enough, there's video pong on a projector TV, car crashes, malls skating rinks, ferns, gymnastics, and kids using curse words (Kaity tells Ford to go fuck himself, but haltingly, like a real kid would in the 70s when foul language still had some mystical power).


Most 70s of all is its use of ancient alien theory, Gnosticism and Buddhism rather than the usual Catholic iconography to underwrite its high strangeness. If you've read my 'other' blog, Divinorum Psychonauticus, you know I support that decision. Franco Nero with his electric yellow hippie wig makes a great Jesus, and Franco Micalizzi's funk-galactic score effectively conjures memories of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as re-imagined by Meco! (How the fuckwas that ever a hit?)

Trump Factor: A scheming CEO being pressured into a virulently pro-life position by Satanic illuminati benefactors, Raymond lacks only Trump's questo cazzo to up his polls. Hillary could be the ex-husband abortionist and America is poor Barbara. And maybe that's the message we come away with: No matter how persistent and bluntly the devil woos us, even if he arranges 'accidents' to make us dependent on him, we needn't vote for him. God aka Lord Enki (alias Jerzy aka The Visitor) is pro-choice, but picking his side means having your selfish malice ripped from your soul by cleansing bird swarms aka paying higher income tax.

Have you paid yours yet, dear reader? Capone didn't. Does he look worried?  Salute!