Thanks for the memories!

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Written by the 30 year old Jack Nicholson !! I saw this years ago... never knew he wrote it. One of a handful of films from the 60s and 70s that honestly dealt with drug use (Skidoo. The President's Analyst. The Acid Eaters would come a year later. ) Some AWESOME street and neighborhood scenes of 1960's Los Angeles. Too much fun. Peter Fonda. Dennis Hopper. Susan Strasberg. Bruce Dern. Everything is groovy, man, filmed during the upswing of the flower power years. Is there a plot? Yeah, sort of. Doesn't really matter. Quite the serious disclaimer at the beginning. I guess this film was pretty shocking for the movie patrons at the time, when everyone would have gone to the theater to see it. Pot smoking. Acid. Planning for it, talking about it, and doing it. Tight pants and short skirts. Midgets, Middle Ages. Too weird. The focus and the sound are a little shaky, but who cares. Finally being shown on Turner Classic Movies. Definitely worth watching, for the psychedelic hippies, clothes, and wallpaper. Some interesting extras in the cast list... Brandon DeWilde, Peter Bogdano, Gram Parsons. Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson, and Luana Anders would work together in Easy Rider, of course. Didn't end well for DeWilde or Parsons. Anders died pretty young too. Catch both The Trip and Easy Rider when they come on. Excellent stories.

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a television commercial director, is in the midst of a personality crisis. His wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) has left him and he seeks the help of his friend John (Bruce Dern), a self-styled guru who's an advocate of LSD.The film was directed by Corman, written by Jack Nicholson, starring Bruce Dern with a beard, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. How can that be bad? The biggest problem is that the plot is relatively weak and relies heavily on some wild kaleidoscopic visuals. That may not be a problem -- I mean, there are still great actors and a dwarf -- but it is a noticeable flaw.

Lookout! The Sixties are here! In the form of flashback and deep reflection of consciousness. It's a pleasant vibe of a collaboration between the likes of Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson and the master of Independent and exploitation cinema Roger Corman, showing us just exactly how the groovy people pass the time of day. With a backdrop of Sixties nostalgia: the cloths, the music and attitudes of the loved-up generation intermingling with the likes of those outside looking in. Being the new-kid-on-the-block Paul Groves (Fonda), who with a little help from his friends, the drug dealing Max (Hopper) and his mentor and guide for the evening John (Bruce Dern) all assisting in providing the first acid trip for Groves.The whole show moves and grooves along in the timeline of circumstance and prediction to the point of it looking like an information-pack on the pros-and-cons of the use of Lysergic acid diethylamide.It does not fully feel like exploitation cinema because it simply does not come across as forcible, overly surreal and altogether exploitive, while picking on points of love, sex, life and death, the film hints at the nicer points of the psychedelic wonders to the point of cliché. Roger Corman (b. 1926) uses visuals and interesting, and intriguing, quick, sharp, colourful edit's to highlight the experience of Groves first time trip, and with a soundtrack of rock (think of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and you're nearly there) and ragtime jazz to help float down stream, it's all, again, very pretty to absorb. The interesting point here is that the viewer here is both traveller and observer, internally and externally, to Groves trip and from the outside looking in it can be a little discouraging to see a fully grown man commenting on the flowing energy of an… orange.The introduction to this film makes a clear warning that not all may be well in the playground of colours and light and to heed this film as a cautionary tale of the use of its subject, LSD. This is pointed out when Groves escapes his controlled environment and runs to the real-time location of the L. A. streets and bars. Finding himself in the home of a very young child, then accosting a woman's washing in the local Laundromat to the reality check of the waitress's comment "You're stoned out of your mind…what's the matter with you guy's? Isn't the real world good enough for you?" Proving that the decade of free love and the doctrine's of Timothy Leary (1920 - 1996) was done, and not too, with free will and personal choice. Not everyone cared for inner transcendence. The dangers of use here is concluded at the final freeze-frame shot of Groves face and his new "…do it tomorrow…" outlook of life and the cracking of the screen to represent the point of no return and the possible damage caused by his experience with his distorted change of mind set.The Trip really is an exemplary work of the nineteen sixties youth counterculture philosophy of turn on, tune in and drop out, which, in the end, in hindsight, just may have been an exploitation movie after all. Just as Messer's Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson new how to exploit the new age thinking to their advantage they new how to adapt to this new age philosophy oh so well. Coming down from this trip to dwell on their next exploits and with experience under their belts, they may need to spread their wings, perhaps maybe an easy ride across country may be forthcoming? A different sort of trip, perhaps?

Someone might have asked if this trip was really necessary, but the makers of the movie seem to have thought so. It would be fun to know what Jack Nicholson thinks now about writing the script for this. It would be even more fun to watch this movie now if Jack Nicholson had acted in it. From what I have read about the man's life, his own experiences with the named chemical had been some what ill fated prior to this. Voice of experience? Perhaps, with a hint of fun also.And a fun movie it is, outdated gracefully. For once, a Roger Corman picture does look cheap unlike his other small budgeted ventures, where inventiveness usually covered the small amounts of money used in production. Still, enough interesting visuals are delivered. It was particularly nice to see a little more footage of the psychedelic mansion, that I had earlier seen featured in some promotional clips of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Just like the times, that house apparently doesn't exist anymore either.Through the soundtrack of the movie a small but peculiar link to 'Easy Rider' popped up. The music in the scenes where Fonda is tripping about being chased by the mysterious riders etc. is also used shortly in 'Easy Rider' right after the graveyard acid trip scene, where Fonda and Hopper leave New Orleans. To my memory it's the only moment in 'Easy Rider' of ordinary background type of music being used. Now, this has probably been just a coincidence or an expense wise decision from the makers. But still I couldn't help thinking, could this in a way be the same guy who will later get killed on another trip with his dealer friend? Ah, go figure. If The Trip was remade today, the chemical subject matter would no doubt be something more dangerous, the old lovely kaleidoscopic effects would be made with computer graphics. And in the end maybe a heavier penalty would be passed on the main character. Here the treatment is surprisingly mellow and even objectively contemplating. No heavy fear and loathing in San Francisco, not yet anyway. Viewed today, the cracking of the image on the final frame demanded by the censors only adds some more objectivity on the character. He's already hinted to cracking a bit from a crisis before he took the drug and the debris from it still remain. And there is nothing really obscene in the film. Not if the psychedelic love-making does not strike you as such. Oh, did I wake up your interest? Try this at home, kids. The movie, I mean.