Trip with the Teacher (1975)

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.

Ever since Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez produced and directed Death Proof and Planet of Terror, respectively, my interest in grindhouse and drive in movies has been ignited. I never knew much about these types of movies other than that they were pretty lame compared to big budget movies with high paid lead actors. My parents and aunts and uncles used to tell me stories about how these types of exploitation movies and theatrical outings were popular social gatherings on the weekends. I got "Trip with the Teacher" as part of a box set of 100 movies at a clearance sale of a department store. This movie starred a bunch of unknowns who either did very little after this, were featured in mostly the occasional TV series or had professional acting careers early on before this. Only the lead villain went on to any kind of stardom as an executive producer. Miss Tenny and her four female students are riding on a small school bus on a field trip to the desert to see some Indian ruins. While stopping for gas, they encounter three bikers, friendly Jay, Pete and his mysterious brother, Al. When their bus breaks down further down the road, the bikers stop to oversee the situation. While Jay wants to help, the sinister and psychotic Al has other plans for the young nubile women. From what I've already seen of these types of movies, this is a typical biker-dominates- women sexploitation movie. The girls are all cute and showing plenty of legs in shorts and skirts. But the story is pretty thin and isn't even as interesting as the average late 60s biker movies or any of the Billy Jack or William Smith movies that explored similar themes. It's just average drive-in flick that gets teens hot enough to fog up the windows of their cars a little then throws in a little showdown at the end. Lead baddie, Zalman King, went on to executive produce the popular cable series, "Red Shoe Diaries". Guess he's always had a thing for sexual themes, be it soft erotica or sexploitation.

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.

Trip with the Teacher is standard exploitation fare that just doesn't fully embrace what it is supposed be, namely, exploitive. The premise has the right formula of sleazy ingredients: Miss Tenny and her group of gorgeous twenty-something women exploring remote desert vistas are joined in their travels by three wayward bikers and are soon stranded somewhere in the desert. After the mentally unstable Al, played by Zalman King in all his face contorting madness, runs down the bus driver in one of his many fits of rage he talks his laid back and seemingly stoned brother Pete into eliminating any witnesses. Unfortunately for them the brothers rode along with good samaritan Jay who attempts to protect the utterly useless women from these two buffoons. Of course Jay manages to screw that up leaving the lovely ladies to fend for themselves by cowering in corners of a dilapidated shack. This is what drove me insane. The women constantly outnumbered their captors and could have easily escaped if they all weren't so helpless. What would be more satisfying than watching a bunch of half-naked tormented women tearing these guys to death? It's an exploitation movie! Exploit! Zalman King with his humongous bug-eyed sunglasses is more annoying than terrifying as his bouts of madness consist of a mess of hair, nose, and giggling. The only redeeming quality of this film is the beautiful women in various states of undress. I was particularly enamored with the bad girl portrayed by the stunning Dina Ousley. With her yellow short-shorts she is definitely the hottest thing in the desert. Trip with the teacher does capture the feel of the early seventies southern California hippie biker culture well. Sadly, after you watch it once you will have no desire to see it again.