Not really sure why I hadn't seen this before. I went through a phase of really obsessing about the 'summer of love'. I was intrigued by psychedelia, acid, free love, Haight-Ashbury and all that shite. I also used to really love Jack Nicholson- still do to an extent- and so this should have been right up my street. What I really envied was the feeling that people seemed to have that everything was just about to get a whole lot better- a zeitgeist that probably lasted for a couple of weeks and no more. Wisdom and experience have taught me how false a dawn it was. The Paris riots, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Altamont, Kent State and everything that followed were bad enough, but learning how the Haight became full of broken-minded junkies almost overnight and how the whole thing allowed Nixon to get a stranglehold on America does sour the taste a little. So there's baggage accompanying this film. It isn't just a Corman exploitation flick (it is that, obviously) but it's a relic from a shattered dream. It represents the crushing of hope under the weight of the establishment, the man rules okay!
Excluding the context, how is it as a film? Well, a failure I guess. It's like being at a party where you're the only person who isn't drunk. There's a lot of fun being had but you aren't included and watching other people in an altered state isn't exactly rewarding. Peter Fonda (who undergoes the titular trip) sees things that scare him or make him feel euphoric or blow his mind, but we just see dwarves or mounted men in soft-focus. If the aim of the film is to replicate the LSD experience- whether for educational reasons as the introductory titles claim, or to make a quick buck like any other exploitation film- then it fails miserably. Except in the sense that LSD is a dissociative drug and I was anything but engaged.
What is interesting about The Trip is how it is almost a dry run for Easy Rider, lots of things that work well in that movie (the campfire scene, the counter-culture dialogue, the way the sunlight bleeds into the camera, the different film effects used, Fonda's dissatisfaction with the career/marriage conformist life and Hopper's monumental performance) are given a dry run here. And for that, it is important. So I forgive it for being a bit crap. 4/10
