I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This enigma has heart. Humble start, following a folk minstrel, who then breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience. A truly astounding desert expedition sequence, mainly due to the eerie soundtrack. Strange dreams. Touching moments. A ridiculous post-Woodstock music rave. The only complaints I have are (1) it's padded, and (2) the ending simply trails off, notwithstanding a standard double-ending.Re padding, a bit much repetitive squabbling. Re the ending, this is where I took away points. I really believed the end of the world was nigh throughout, so I was taken aback when Andy was so easily dispatched and that was that. But then comes the double-ending, an announcer building up some tension about further deaths, and finally we find the flowers proliferating, as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and so forth. That part seemed tacked on as a nod to propriety, but without that ending there would be a dull thud.

"Premonition" (aka "Head") is a living proof that you don't need much to make a decent horror film with a limited budget as long as you know what you're doing and you know how to built suspense and thrills without overcomplicating with your story. What appealed to me the most in this film was that it was a compelling drama with glances of horror rather than creatures/gore shocker show common in the 1970's. Disciple of one of the godfathers of the Independent Cinema, the late Robert Altman, the undervalued Alan Rudolph started his director career with this film which is far from everything he would make in the years to come (examples: the unconventional romcom "Choose Me; "Mortal Thoughts" (1991) and "Afterglow"). Anyway, to the heart of the matter. It tells the story of three musician friends who start to have recurring dreams that predict their deaths, and the probably cause in at least two of the guys is that they made some experimentations with a drug plant found by one of them during a mysterious expedition on an indigenous territory. The leader of the group desperately tries to make them stay sober and focus on their music but getting rid off of those images won't be that easy."Head" (as I prefer to call it) is a concrete drama about addiction and how it affects not only the addicted person but everyone around him. I think the horror, represented in the fuzzy, noisy and scary images of a group of small women slaying the men, is just a way to approach viewers from such a story. You care about the characters and what they go through, it looks real and not some imaginative and complex monstrosity. Rudolph doesn't need much to haunt you, sure it has that 1970's B horror movie kind of feel, stiff acting but there's some strong effects as well - the use of sound itself in the dreams and the expedition sequences are terrifying. I liked Carl Crow's performance as the main character, he was the most convincing on scene, and sad to know that it was his last performance - no much information about what happened to him except that he died at a young age.There's plenty of things to be learned with this film, film students pay attention to it. It's conciseness is very hard to be found these days. The version available comes from a poor VHS version but manageable to watch nonetheless. 7/10

A music band shacks up in a cabin to practice for an audition at a hippie gathering of some sort -- all the while smoking weed from a mysterious red flower that gives them hallucinations and nightmares. The acting was both bad and good; at points it was natural, at points terrible. The film was well shot, the locations real dirty and gritty and there we're some beautiful shots of landscapes and women, along with some wonderfully freaky imagery. Other highlights include the music; you have folksy guitar rhythms, charming b-movie pulsating synths, and a wonderful dancing hippie sequence towards the end. If you're into rare b movies, and can tolerate bad editing, incomprehensible story lines, and characters narrating the story directly into the camera, it's worth seeking out for the hippies alone.

A sidestepped horror film mostly noted as an early effort from Alan Rudolph, PREMONITION is a hazy, mystical horror outing which involves a hippie music group taking residence in the pastoral outlands of the San Francisco Bay Area. Various interpersonal hostilities are vented, and numerous doobies passed around before they begin experiencing collective nightmares/hallucinations of impending doom. It's implied that this is a paranormal brain response triggered by exposure to strange red wildflowers, though there may be some nebulous connection to a malformed skeleton unearthed by one of the band members during an archaeological excavation some years earlier.PREMONITION is a distinctly early-70s product, alight with post-psychedelic artistic pushiness and intermittent brushes of electronic music by pre-famed Harold Budd. It's an ambling, occasionally intriguing work of psychotomimetic vagary, and probably too experimental and ambiguous for mainstream audience appreciation. While the film has definite handicaps, primarily with pacing and concatenation, it does possess a gauzy "will-o'-the-wisp" eeriness which is unique and variably effective.Possibly the most tranquil horror film you'll ever see...it's a peculiar one, to be sure. 4.5/10