'Gas-s-s-s - or - it became necessary to destroy the world in order to save it?' What a name! Country Joe & the Fish? What a soundtrack! Scribbled animation? What an opening scene! From the start this briskly but pointedly pokes fun at the military, politicians, pundits, police, conservatives, bureaucracy, the arbitrariness with which "authority" stakes claim and makes rules, and much, much more to come. Elsewhere and otherwise, it plays ever so irreverently with just about every idea one could imagine, and has little care even for the slightest sense of authenticity or sobriety; just wait for the major "action sequence" at around the twenty minute mark. Then there's the trippy imagery to greet us at one point, notably including an unorthodox sex scene that also runs editor George Van Noy out in the yard, and active, zesty cinematography that seems to basically represent Ron Dexter just running wild. There's a lot going on here, and from the outset it seems pretty great! That feeling, however, does not last. This isn't the first movie I've watched that started out surprisingly strong only to take a huge tumble and never truly recover, but I think this might be the worst and clumsiest example. A "gas" this is not.
I think the picture is much less than successful in its effort to comment on the follies and unpreparedness of youth culture. Where other concepts are broached with sage satirical nuance, broadly this is so roundly farcical, and emptily so, that its young characters just become hollow straw men, and the intended effect is rendered moot. Other notions with which the film dallies are poor subject matter for such an unserious romp (especially, you know, sexual assault); too much of the scene writing and dialogue is completely random, detached from any meaningful sense of narrative or a unifying vision and therefore pointless and tiresome. For too much of these seventy-eight minutes, when a possible point of intelligence does crop up it quickly gets subsumed in the nonsensical inanity and vaporizes into nothing. There are occasional pinpricks of brilliance peppered throughout, but at large this is emphatically inconsistent, and before long it just becomes laborious and exhausting to watch. Increasingly as the length draws on, I just ponder what it was anyone was trying to achieve in a given moment.
George Armitage put some real wit in his screenplay, and we can see the same in Roger Corman's direction. It's too bad such value is ultimately minimal, and lost amidst writing that generally comes across as directionless, haphazard, lackluster, unfocused, scattered, and inconsequential. Whatever earnest thought there may have been herein, whatever cleverness, it's easily outweighed and forgotten well before the feature trips and skids to a halt over the finish line. Over the course of its length 'Gas-s-s-s' slides from, initially, "hey, this seems rather slick," to "what happened to the writing," to "I think those early scenes were a red herring" - and it does so in only about the first half, if even that. Someone out there watches this film and finds significantly more entertainment, a riotous good time. I feel like I was duped at the beginning into believing this would end up being worthwhile, and I want my seventy-eight minutes back.
I think the picture is much less than successful in its effort to comment on the follies and unpreparedness of youth culture. Where other concepts are broached with sage satirical nuance, broadly this is so roundly farcical, and emptily so, that its young characters just become hollow straw men, and the intended effect is rendered moot. Other notions with which the film dallies are poor subject matter for such an unserious romp (especially, you know, sexual assault); too much of the scene writing and dialogue is completely random, detached from any meaningful sense of narrative or a unifying vision and therefore pointless and tiresome. For too much of these seventy-eight minutes, when a possible point of intelligence does crop up it quickly gets subsumed in the nonsensical inanity and vaporizes into nothing. There are occasional pinpricks of brilliance peppered throughout, but at large this is emphatically inconsistent, and before long it just becomes laborious and exhausting to watch. Increasingly as the length draws on, I just ponder what it was anyone was trying to achieve in a given moment.
George Armitage put some real wit in his screenplay, and we can see the same in Roger Corman's direction. It's too bad such value is ultimately minimal, and lost amidst writing that generally comes across as directionless, haphazard, lackluster, unfocused, scattered, and inconsequential. Whatever earnest thought there may have been herein, whatever cleverness, it's easily outweighed and forgotten well before the feature trips and skids to a halt over the finish line. Over the course of its length 'Gas-s-s-s' slides from, initially, "hey, this seems rather slick," to "what happened to the writing," to "I think those early scenes were a red herring" - and it does so in only about the first half, if even that. Someone out there watches this film and finds significantly more entertainment, a riotous good time. I feel like I was duped at the beginning into believing this would end up being worthwhile, and I want my seventy-eight minutes back.