So who directed this mess, anyway? While preparing an afternoon of Public Domain Theater, I notice that Getting Wasted is credited to Sam Wood. Sam Wood? You mean the MGM workhorse, the man responsible for the Marx Brother's A Night At the Opera? It must have been a comedown for the old man to direct a bongs 'n' boobs comedy. Being dead for 41 years will freeze anyone's career. The real Wood keeled over in the 1940s with a heart attack right after making The Stratton Story, the handicapped-pitcher baseball film parodied in Woody Allen's Radio Days. This disk, got from my favorite 99 cent store, conceals the fact that the real director was a one Paul Frizler, a former lit professor from Chapman College in Orange County, California.

Like the way this DVD cover claims the movie's distributor is Miracle Pictures*, the Wood joke must be real inside baseball. I assume the reference to a badly-staged re-enactment of the famous "Stateroom Scene" here, where a dorm room gets stuffed full of actors playing military cadets. As for top-billed Caruso (actually 34th billed in the end credits) he gets even less screen time in this movie than "Leary", a dead taxidermed parrot. The demised stuffed bird fits in nicely with this month's turkey theme....


Like many of the Public Domainers I've seen, a good deal of Getting Wasted's running time involves characters driving around aimlessly in LA. This occurs even in the pulse-pounding titles, in which a line of hitchhikers waits on the side of the road, as the Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" plays. This is good, as far as I'm concerned, because I grew up in the Southland, and I keep hoping to spot my worthless teenage self, crossing the street or standing with my thumb hanging out. Such a scene would naturally be less of a thrill to the casual viewer, waiting for this pimple on the keister of Up The Academy to get started.

In 1967, Brad Carson (Brian Kerwin) a young man from Tuscon, is sent off to the California Armed Forces Academy after he flunks out of high school. "We're very liberal around here," claims a cadet, explaining why no one had to have a haircut for the film. In fact, there's a lot of squealers and some bullying. Those who are caught swearing are forced to eat a bowl of jalapeno peppers until they barf. Stefan Arngrim's Charlie "Choo-Choo" Delouz (a Kerouac ref, I bet) has actually cracked from the maltreatment. After being tied to the railroad tracks by the thugs at the school, he's become obsessed by the nearby train, and keeps trying to figure out ways to derail it. One time, he steals pats of butter from the cafeteria and greases the tracks. When this fails, Angrim stands watching the engine pass, pulling faces like Montgomery Clift tearing himself emotionally apart. This, perhaps the best scene of the film, could be easily mashed with Stuart Lancaster's speech from Faster, Pussycat!, Kill! Kill!: "Blow your horn, sound your warning! Huff and puff and maim and kill, and go on unpunished!"

The students electronically bug the school's administration to see what trouble is brewing. Meanwhile, Brad cuts class to hang with the hippies by the beach. Paula (Wendy Rastattar, Spawn of the Slithis) sells macrame plant holders out of a Scooby Doo Mystery Machine-style van with eyeballs painted all over it. She seems to be joined at the hip with Andy (Peter Alsop), owner of the little dead pet Leary the parrot, who he's rigged up to be his ventriloquist dummy. The tragic ex-parrot wears a button on his breast reading "Stoned."

Drugs come to the rescue here. Brad wanders through a psychedelic shop called "The Roach Clip Joint." He admires the glowing posters in "The Black Light Room." He encounters a little kid selling underweight bags of marijuana. ("Did you `pinch' it again?" Paula frowns.) Later, at Paula's, he eats a macrobiotic dinner off of glow-in-the-dark plates made of uranium glass. And there's banana peel smoking parties after hours. The cadets enjoy a home-made light show with a "zilch": a plastic dry cleaning bag woven into a knotted rope, set alight so that it will drip fire. Plenty of fond memories of the hippie days to enjoy, when you're laying around getting chemotherapy from breathing the fumes and eating off the radioactive fiestaware.

Getting Wasted is long on atmosphere and short of plot. Producer David P. Buanno must have had a good deal somewhere, though, because the soundtrack is loaded with KHJ boss radio hits. The Mommas and the Poppas "Monday, Monday" accompany a dirt biker tearing up the turf. There's a show-stopping (nay, show slaughtering) montage of popular rock where the wacky students blow up condoms for balloons, mix steer manure into the confetti, and douse the fruit punch with half-pint bottles of Southern Comfort. Meanwhile, a string of cover bands assault everything from the Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" to "Piece of My Heart".

There is, however, moments where this genuine Butterball comes to life. Stephen Furst--the Belushi of this opus--gets blown up by an exploding toilet. Then he tells a mutant, apparently improvised, version of the plot of The Giant Claw in the lobby of a movie theater, whilst soaking his popcorn in quarts of imitation margarine. Later, Furst provokes a mini-version of the Zoot Suit riots by regaling a group of angry Chicano gangsters with his imitation of "Goldtooth" in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Comic. Sort of. But even more evocative is a depressing Xmas vacation sequence where Brad returns home to Arizona. His buddies amuse themselves by driving around at midnight, rolling flaming tires out of the back of an El Camino. His mother, being the proud new owner of a microwave oven, tries to dry off her dog in it with ribtickling results. And then there's the "but seriously folks" part of the story: a flashback to the tale of a persecuted teacher whom the townsfolk drove to unemployment and suicide. A real movie keeps threatening to break out of this sucker, but the effort to realize it is as doomed as Choo-Choo's plans to derail that train. I kept hoping the ending of Getting Wasted would be a reprise of Flaubert's "A Simple Soul". Leary the parrot wakes up, blinks, says something straight to the camera like "Far out, man!" and flaps away.

*"If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle." Old jokes never die, they just smell that way.