Teenagers Glen and Randa are members of a tribe that lives in a rural area, several decades after nuclear war has devastated the planet. They know nothing of the outside world, except that Glen has read about and seen pictures of a great city in some old comic books. He and Randa set out to find this city.
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Bizarrely, GLEN & RANDA was shown on late night TV here in the UK, so I decided to give it a watch having never heard of it before. I'm not exactly sure what I watched; ostensibly this is a post-apocalyptic movie dealing with mankind's struggle to adapt in a ruined world, but it's also an incredibly slow moving film in which very little incident actually happens.The film begins with a couple of naked hippies strolling around and moves on from there. The female character falls pregnant and this sub-plot takes up a lot of screen time. The performances, shall we say, naturalistic to say the least, and there's a lot of waffle and philosophical debate as the characters interact with others in their landscape. I did like the way the central twosome are searching for a mystical comic book city and the cinematography is quite good on a zero budget, but there's too little meat here to sustain a proper movie.
A young, naive post-nuke couple (Steven Curry with Sideshow Bob hair, and Martha's mother Shelley Plimpton) leave their commune to search for "the city" (using Wonder Woman comics as a reference). They never do find it, and she dies during childbirth at the end of this mostly dreary, low-key 16mm American Film Institure-backed effort that received an X for casual nudity when released in '71. The best part is early on with Garry Goodrow (a jobbing character actor who later co-wrote HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID) excellent as a lecherous motormouth travelling "magician" who puts on a show (great use of The Rolling Stones' Time Is On My Side). Shot in California and Oregon. The first screenplay attempt by then-hip novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, he wrote TWO-LANE BLACKTOP next. McBride had already made a couple of documentaries and David HOLZMAN'S DIARY. He made HOT TIMES (also with Curry) next.Movie reviews at: spinegrinderweb.com
Glen and Randa is raw and has a hedonistic feel to it. The film was originally released in 1970 with an X rating because of (gasp!) full frontal male nudity! Don't want people to see that male genitalia.The film has a sort of low key, low budget amateurish feel to it at times. There are a few scenes which are sort of strange and silly at the same time. If it had been played serious by all the actors it could have felt sort of sleazy but most of the time it has a slight camp feel to it.The film also has an innocence to it that makes it feel very refreshing. Glen and Randa like to frolic in the nude at times and after exposed to a traveling entertainer they decide to leave their group and travel on their own and find "metropolis", a city with people dressed all in white but find that much isn't left after the holocaust.One other element I enjoyed was that there aren't any crazy people out to kill, rape or mame. You don't have to really worry about what will happen to these two as they travel alone.There are moments that seem very dated and some of the scenes aren't shot that well. It's not a film that makes a huge impact but it does linger in your head a bit afterward mainly because of the youth of the lead characters.
A downbeat post-WWIII film that has practically no soundtrack; there is an old pop hit being played on a record player, and some of the characters briefly sing a bit, but basically there is no music. A very silent, calm film which takes a little while (10-20 min.) to get interesting. The gloom isn't realized with dark scenes and depressed faces; it's realized with the lack of music, the miserable living conditions of the characters, and by the events.Whether it's realistic or not depends on how you look at it; it's realistic enough within the framework of the world that is envisioned here. However, at least 20 years have passed since the Armageddon, and people still live like rats which is an underestimation of humankind's ability to re-organize. I mean, all that the group of people (the ones Glen & Randa belong to) in the movie do is collect cans of food. Also, there is a ridiculous scene where Randa holds a piece of raw fish and lights it briefly with a match, then eats it! Surely, even cave people would have more culture than that. Surely, Glen and Randa - as super-naive as they are shown to be - at least ought to know that fire is used to prepare meat.But otherwise the realism achieved is far greater than in most post-apocalyptic films, and there are no other exaggerations that I can think of.After seeing the fish-hunting scene (literally "hunting fish") it's safe to say that the movie can make no claims that "no fish were killed during the making of this film".