Where's Eric Cartman, a giant mechanized drilling machine, and a Slayer CD when you really need them?"Wild in the Streets" is a laughably dated curiosity piece from the late 60's that really has to be seen to be believed.The plot: We're introduced to the life of one "Max Jacob Flatow, Jr." aka "Max Frost" (Christopher Jones) from his unwanted conception to his dysfunctional childhood due to his mother (Shelley Winters) being a frigid harpy to his running away from home as a teen. We later meet Max as a 22 yr old lead singer of a successful pop group. Although he's an acid-dropping, dope-smoking layabout with several illegitimate children and is surrounded by ne'er-do-well hippies (yes, a redundancy), Max has become one of the richest men in the country. (Hippies have money?) With his wealth and massive youth following, Max's support is sought by politicians.Enter ambitious "Johnny Fergus" (Hal Holbrook), a 37 yr old family man, who wants to be a senator. He's a supporter of lowering the voting age to 18, and believes that Max can further help him wrap-up the youth vote. However, Max knowing that the young outnumber the "Old Tigers" (anyone over 30) demands that Fergus help him lower the voting age to 15 in exchange for his support. Fergus agrees and wins his coveted senate seat. Yet, Max isn't through. With voting age lowered, he's able to get his acid-head girlfriend (Diane Varsi) elected to congress from which she pushes for an amendment to lower the age restrictions to 14 for all political offices including the presidency. The amendments pass with the assistance of spiking the water supply with LSD.Max then becomes president and disbands the military, FBI, CIA, and secret service; ends all foreign entanglements; feeds all the hungry nations; and imprisons anyone over 35 in concentration camps where they're force-fed LSD including his nutty mother and Senator Fergus who woke-up too late to the monster he helped create.This is one seriously whacked-out film. It goes to show how desperate Hollywood was in the late 60's to reach the youth audience, and it really thought this LSD-inspired mess would do the trick. It's supposed to be a satire, but it panders to many of the nuttiest excesses of the late 60's counterculture. Yet, at the same time, it also portrays the hippies as power-mad fascists. It's so ham-handed that it comes across as a bad acid trip. Overall, it's just so ridiculously stupid that it can't be viewed as either satire, parody, or broad comedy. There is absolutely nothing clever or witty about this film.As for the cast, no one comes-off well here. Ed Begley and Shelley Winters ham it up to an extreme extent. Christopher Jones was briefly a hot commodity, but quickly disappeared from the film scene. Richard Pryor has a small role as "Token Black" who plays drums rather than bass in Max's cheesy band. The only other "notable" is Barry Williams (aka "Greg Brady") in a brief scene as adolescent Max.Like the now unintentionally funny Billy Jack films, "Zabriskie Point, "The Strawberry Statement," and other awful counter-culture films of the late 60's and early 70's, "Wild in the Streets" is an absurd time capsule that really makes one wonder how did the CIA or the Commies manage to spike America's water supply?

I remembered this film as being one of the best movies to capture the spirit of the 60's. It's ageism is now a little funny and seems dated. The performances are great and the social satire is still as cutting edge as ever.It's an alternate universe version of the uptight older generation's worst nightmare. Christopher Jones is so much like James Dean, I thought for years after I first saw it that it was him playing Max Frost. He's incredibly dynamic and I've always wondered why he didn't have a bigger career. Hal Holbrook is great as an ambitious and idealistic Senator who ends up getting played. Shelley Winter does another great job as the semi-hysterical shrew, mother. Ed Begley Sr. as the voice of the 'Establishment' , Richard Pryor (in his first film roll)are also on hand. Even Dick Clark has a cameo. 'Nothing Can Change the Shape of Things to Come' was a bonafide hit, being covered by Paul Revere and the Raiders.The crime log narration that runs through it lends a campy mock documentary feel. The shear audacity of the movie is what made me love it and why I love it still. I mean a bunch of LSD being dumped in Congress' water supply would at least explain why they are constantly doing such goofy crap, wouldn't it? This is a movie that never took itself too seriously and that's why it has aged so well, which is sort of ironic in itself.

Shrewd, surly rock star Max Frost (superbly played by the handsome, charismatic Christopher Jones) convinces sleazy, opportunistic Senator Jimmy Fergus (a terrific Hal Holbrook) to lower the legal drinking age to 14. After Max is elected president by a landslide victory, he makes the retirement age 30 and places anyone who's 35 and over in rehabilitation camps where they are regularly fed LSD to keep them docile. Director Barry Shear, working from a diabolically creative and wickedly witty script by Robert Thom, relates the outrageous, yet chilling and creepy satirical premise with tremendous rip-roaring brio and style (Shear also helmed the harrowing "The Todd Killings" and the exciting crime caper yarn "Across 110th Street," plus did the pilot for "Starsky and Hutch"!). Richard Moore's bright, vibrant cinematography makes expert use of funky freeze frames and snazzy split screen. The rousing garage rock theme song, "The Shape of Things to Come," peaked at #22 on the pop charts (and has been recently used as a jingle for Target department stores). The legendary Paul Frees tackles narrator chores with his trademark plummy aplomb. The remarkable cast qualifies as another significant asset: the ever-crazed Shelley Winters as Max's monstrous, overbearing mother, Diane Varsi as a former child star turned zonked-out hippie chick, Millie Perkins as Fergus' sweet wife, AIP biker pic regular Larry Bishop as a trumpet player with a hook hand, Ed Begley as a crusty old senator, Kevin Coughlin as a cagey adolescent whiz kid lawyer, Richard Pryor as Max's groovy drummer, and Bert Freed as Max's weak, emasculated father. Dick Clark, Walter Winchell, Melvin Belli, Pamela Mason, Army Archerd and Jack Lathan pop up as themselves. The sequence with all of Congress wacked out on acid is positively gut-busting. The final hilarious line of dialogue makes for the perfect closing zinger for this gloriously insane movie. The MGM DVD offers an excellent widescreen transfer along with the theatrical trailer on an ideal doublebill with Roger Corman's equally nutty "Gas-s-s-s."

This film is a time warp of Los Angeles and the Sunset Strip in the 1960's. At first sigthing on the FLIX Channel I thought the actor was James Dean. Uncanny resemblance.Richard Pryor as the drummer in a rock band getting high on LSD with topless white chicks must of been mind blowing for teenagers then. I missed this film totally in 1968. My parents probably made sure of it.To see Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd, and the greatest lawyer in the nation at that time, Melvin Belli, playing themselves in a film with a whacked out Shelly Winters was just amazing.The real night time Sunset Strip cruising footage of 1968 was really "far-out man".