PSYCHEDELIC SEX KICKS
Something Weird. Download.

As part of Something Weird’s ongoing project to make their astounding archive available for downloads, the frankly demented Psychedelic Sex Kicks has been digitised and reissued. And what an oddball film it is.

Sold – and presumably made – as a soft porn movie at the arse-end of the 1960s, the film opens with the world’s most unconvincing hippy – middle aged, receding hairline, dodgy ‘tache and loud paisley shirt – picking up two homely flower children and taking them home in his VW camper van to his ‘pad’, where they proceed to smoke dope, drop acid and take their clothes off. Perhaps this isn’t too far fetched – after all, Charlie Manson was in his mid-Thirties when he collected his band of followers, and remembering that gives a sinister slant to proceedings. All this has taken place with an oddball stream-of-consciousness voice-over from the guy, clearly to compensate for the fact that the film has clearly been shot on 16mm (at times, it looks like 8mm) without sound. His vaguely cynical ramblings are like a poor man’s Hunter S. Thompson musing on drugs, hippies and free love. But as the girls start to strip, another voice takes over – a movie-trailer voice spouting the sort of thing Russ Meyer would be proud of:

“What you are about to see is mind imagery… what you hear, what you feel, what you sense is brought to crescendo in the wildest soul-shocking trip… a sensual, Id-shattering experience. Some will be permanently changed by this trip – other will follow the sick soul of psychedelic love… can you dig it? Can you take in your soul all the sensations you’re about to feel, see, experience?”

Inspirational stuff, and the film does its best to live up to this promise, with the two hippy chicks forgotten as our hero trips his way through double exposure, multi-coloured lighting, spinning camera work and weird imagery of various naked girls dancing in piles of balloons, body painting and rolling around, as a female voice-over spouts more demented nonsense and furious psych rock thunders over the soundtrack. It’s fairly gob-smacking stuff. The film ends with an on-screen caption: “In this Freak-out it could be you – Squares. We hope you dig this… If not –cool it with a banana Skin, and you’ll be down. Speed on…”

After this, second feature Wild Hippie Orgy is bound to be a disappointment, and so it is. Again shot without sound, the film has a copyright-defying rock soundtrack mixed with very odd part sounds, while a rather dull and unattractive collection of people gather for a party that, despite the title, is neither wild nor an orgy. People strip off, but don’t do much else. After some time of this, things suddenly get disturbingly weird as a naked guy has a bad trip and stumbles into a basement where a weird old guy and various naked people taunt him. Before you have time to rationalise this, the film then cuts to what is clearly a different movie entirely – a Something Weird splice-up I assume – with rather more authentic hippies and a genuinely crazed sex ‘n’ drugs orgy. It all ends as abruptly as it began.

Presumably, Wild Hippie Orgy is all that is left of a longer film, and so should be seen as an extra, rather than an equal, and as such is welcome if forgettable. Psychedelic Sex Kicks however, is genuinely insane, and well worth a look.

DAVID FLINT

www.somethingweird.com