Less a depiction of the experience of taking acid than an example of the sort of film you might make if you are on acid throughout the writing, shooting and editing process. This really is a humourless montage of meaningless associations and trippy images that you would need to be deeply and thoroughly acculturated to appreciate.Staring at a flower or a centipede for an hour will be a closer simulation of an acid experience.

Normally I'd avoid Rock Hudson-Doris Day fluff like a brain drain. But after suffering through this mess, I think a Hudson-Day brain drain is better. Apparently producer Corman was chasing after changing youth fashions of the 60's. He'd cornered the market on 50's drive-in fare, but rubber monsters were suddenly out of fashion. So who better to tap into than hipsters Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson. Thanks to the latter turned screenwriter, we get 80-minutes of repetitive psychedelic effects, and little or no story. Well, maybe if you try piecing together some of the images-- hooded riders, blonde sweeties-- you might come up with something symbolic. But I leave that to a midnight study group. Unfortunately, I thought the promising opening presaged something incisive about commercial advertising. But no such luck. Okay, you can take The bad Trip as an artifact of its time, something about counter-cultural search for meaning through drugs. But even as a psychedelic experience, it's still a lousy movie. Happily, Fonda, Nicholson, and Hopper righted their ship two years later with the epochal Easy Rider, that contrasts this mess like a Rembrandt does with an ink blot.

To be honest, I thought I would grow quickly bored with this movie since I heard that all it was is a bunch of cool psychedelic effects and not much else. Well, I actually found it interesting. After an opening five minutes with some bad acting I rolled my eyes but the movie got better....and Peter Fonda's performance got better. Fonda plays Paul, a TV commercial director who goes on his first LSD trip. He thinks he might learn something from it and does. You start to lose track of what reality is just like Paul does. Dennis Hopper has some interesting scenes and Bruce Dern is good as well. Having never touched acid, I can't tell you how realistic the effects are but found them interesting to watch. In order to do research, director Roger Corman took LSD and had a pleasant experience. Bruce Dern however has never taken it so found his role as someone who was kind of an expert on the matter, a challenging acting job. However, Jack Nicolson wrote the script and I expect he did plenty of research...he-he. Surprisingly, a pretty cool movie, dude!

Someone might have asked if this trip was really necessary, but the makers of the movie seem to have thought so. It would be fun to know what Jack Nicholson thinks now about writing the script for this. It would be even more fun to watch this movie now if Jack Nicholson had acted in it. From what I have read about the man's life, his own experiences with the named chemical had been some what ill fated prior to this. Voice of experience? Perhaps, with a hint of fun also.And a fun movie it is, outdated gracefully. For once, a Roger Corman picture does look cheap unlike his other small budgeted ventures, where inventiveness usually covered the small amounts of money used in production. Still, enough interesting visuals are delivered. It was particularly nice to see a little more footage of the psychedelic mansion, that I had earlier seen featured in some promotional clips of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Just like the times, that house apparently doesn't exist anymore either.Through the soundtrack of the movie a small but peculiar link to 'Easy Rider' popped up. The music in the scenes where Fonda is tripping about being chased by the mysterious riders etc. is also used shortly in 'Easy Rider' right after the graveyard acid trip scene, where Fonda and Hopper leave New Orleans. To my memory it's the only moment in 'Easy Rider' of ordinary background type of music being used. Now, this has probably been just a coincidence or an expense wise decision from the makers. But still I couldn't help thinking, could this in a way be the same guy who will later get killed on another trip with his dealer friend? Ah, go figure. If The Trip was remade today, the chemical subject matter would no doubt be something more dangerous, the old lovely kaleidoscopic effects would be made with computer graphics. And in the end maybe a heavier penalty would be passed on the main character. Here the treatment is surprisingly mellow and even objectively contemplating. No heavy fear and loathing in San Francisco, not yet anyway. Viewed today, the cracking of the image on the final frame demanded by the censors only adds some more objectivity on the character. He's already hinted to cracking a bit from a crisis before he took the drug and the debris from it still remain. And there is nothing really obscene in the film. Not if the psychedelic love-making does not strike you as such. Oh, did I wake up your interest? Try this at home, kids. The movie, I mean.