Peter Fonda plays uptight twenty-something TV commercial director Paul Groves. Paul is successful at his work, but it becomes clear (later, during one of his drug-induced reveries) that he has decided ambivalence about using his artistic talents for such work, contributing as it does to a superficial consumerist culture. Paul has flirted with the fringes of the mid- to late-'60s LA hippie counterculture, smoking weed and using 'hip' terminology like 'boppers' and 'groovy,' but it's clear from his diffident and brittle demeanor, his square, preppy clothes (dress shirt, khakis, red v-necked sweater: he could have been a Harvard eating club member circa 1958), and his tentative ways in interacting with friends and women that he's about as hip and cool as Ozzie and Harriett at a human be-in. Further evidence of his discomfort with his current life is his relationship with his adulterous wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) who, it is implied, has had relations with other men because she can find nothing authentic in her husband, the very model of the modern TV commercial director. The marriage is heading for divorce at the film's outset, unsurprisingly.
So one day in this, his life, Paul decides to take a deeper look into himself (pedantic aside: the word "psychedelic" is from the Greek etymons for "soul" and "revealing") by taking his first LSD trip under the guidance of his much more well-centered friend John (Bruce Dern), the drug being acquired from their friendly neighborhood weed dealer, Max (Dennis Hopper). Also cropping up at various points in the story is a beautiful, somewhat enigmatic blonde hippie girl in a white pantsuit who has expressed a curiosity in people who take acid. This is Glenn, played by bikini-beach-movie veteran Salli Sachse. Both Glenn and Sally (remember her? Paul's wife) appear episodically in Paul's acid-fueled visions.
Not much happens narratively: Paul takes acid, Paul has a few brushes with the law while tripping unsupervised through the 1967 Sunset Strip night, Paul concludes his trip with an intimate encounter, Paul is asked if he found the insight he was hoping for and gives his reply. Woven through this story are his reveries, some frightening, some comical, several absurd, all of them visually colorful. The psychedelically-tinged jazz/blues/rock score by "An American Music Band," the horn-plus-traditional-rock-instrumentation band the Electric Flag, is mostly appealing and was composed (by EF founding guitarist Mike Bloomfield, previously of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and later of 'Super Session' fame with Stephen Stills and Al Kooper) and recorded in a matter of a few weeks. Roger Corman, whose status as king of the B movies merely meant that he was very skilled at turning out compelling and entertaining movies working with small budgets and tight shooting schedules, is in fine directorial control, working from a script he commissioned from Jack Nicholson (yes, THAT Jack Nicholson, who does not appear on screen in the movie). And Corman and company accomplish the entire movie excursion in under 80 minutes of screen time.
An interesting note is that Fonda, whose public image was one of cool and self-contained serenity in contrast to Hopper's more histrionic screen persona in the subsequent "Easy Rider" and other movies, in this film plays a man who is not in control at all and is prone to paranoid episodes and moments of panic, while the other principals (Dern, Hopper, Strasberg, Sachse) are calm and collected.
Favorite scenes: Paul's imagined 'trial' for unhipness and inauthenticity with Max (Hopper) as judge/inquisitor, complete with a merry-go-round, waltz-time carnival music, and a merry-go-round horse-riding dwarf shouting 'Bay of Pigs' for no discernible reason; his encounter with a girl in curlers doing her laundry at a laundromat on the Strip; and his interaction with a sarcastic, seen-it-all cocktail waitress in a music club.
So one day in this, his life, Paul decides to take a deeper look into himself (pedantic aside: the word "psychedelic" is from the Greek etymons for "soul" and "revealing") by taking his first LSD trip under the guidance of his much more well-centered friend John (Bruce Dern), the drug being acquired from their friendly neighborhood weed dealer, Max (Dennis Hopper). Also cropping up at various points in the story is a beautiful, somewhat enigmatic blonde hippie girl in a white pantsuit who has expressed a curiosity in people who take acid. This is Glenn, played by bikini-beach-movie veteran Salli Sachse. Both Glenn and Sally (remember her? Paul's wife) appear episodically in Paul's acid-fueled visions.
Not much happens narratively: Paul takes acid, Paul has a few brushes with the law while tripping unsupervised through the 1967 Sunset Strip night, Paul concludes his trip with an intimate encounter, Paul is asked if he found the insight he was hoping for and gives his reply. Woven through this story are his reveries, some frightening, some comical, several absurd, all of them visually colorful. The psychedelically-tinged jazz/blues/rock score by "An American Music Band," the horn-plus-traditional-rock-instrumentation band the Electric Flag, is mostly appealing and was composed (by EF founding guitarist Mike Bloomfield, previously of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and later of 'Super Session' fame with Stephen Stills and Al Kooper) and recorded in a matter of a few weeks. Roger Corman, whose status as king of the B movies merely meant that he was very skilled at turning out compelling and entertaining movies working with small budgets and tight shooting schedules, is in fine directorial control, working from a script he commissioned from Jack Nicholson (yes, THAT Jack Nicholson, who does not appear on screen in the movie). And Corman and company accomplish the entire movie excursion in under 80 minutes of screen time.
An interesting note is that Fonda, whose public image was one of cool and self-contained serenity in contrast to Hopper's more histrionic screen persona in the subsequent "Easy Rider" and other movies, in this film plays a man who is not in control at all and is prone to paranoid episodes and moments of panic, while the other principals (Dern, Hopper, Strasberg, Sachse) are calm and collected.
Favorite scenes: Paul's imagined 'trial' for unhipness and inauthenticity with Max (Hopper) as judge/inquisitor, complete with a merry-go-round, waltz-time carnival music, and a merry-go-round horse-riding dwarf shouting 'Bay of Pigs' for no discernible reason; his encounter with a girl in curlers doing her laundry at a laundromat on the Strip; and his interaction with a sarcastic, seen-it-all cocktail waitress in a music club.