Pick-Up

(1975)

Two far-out hippie chicks catch a ride with a groovy hippie dude who is delivering a bus converted to a mobile home. One of the girls is the life of the party while the other is dark and brooding, and deep into the spiritual and occult. They are diverted by a storm, and end up stuck in the Everglades. The easygoing girl (Jill Senter) wastes little time getting it on with the guy, but her friend (Gini Eastwood) has the more interesting time. She is accosted by a Senatorial candidate, and by a balloon-carrying clown who is actually the devil. Then she remembers the Catholic priest who molested her years earlier, and meets up with a black woman who is a self-proclaimed "Priestess of Apollo" and appoints Gini as her successor. Ms. Eastwood eventually finds redemption and banishes her demons.

I think.

This cult film could only have been made in the hippie era. None of the principal performers ever worked before or since. It would be best viewed under the influence of psychoactive substances, but even straight, it is a total trip. 

It is finally available on DVD as part of a double feature with The Teacher, which I covered yesterday.

C-.

Scoop's notes:

1. To the best of my knowledge, Pick-Up is the only film which featured voice-over work from former Yankee Jim Bouton and also offered an official credit to the film's "astrological advisor."

2. In addition to the one-timers in the cast, as noted by Tuna, it was directed by a director who had no other directing credits before or since, was written by a screenwriter who had no other screenwriting credits before or since, and featured music written by a composer who had no other film credits.

3. One of the film's stars did have a brush with fame, although not in cinema. Gini Eastwood had no other film credits, but she once starred in a hippie-dippie 1972 Broadway Musical called Hard Job Being God in which she played six roles. I guess she was the star. At least she got first billing. Don't be embarrassed if you never heard of it. It ran five performances at the Edison Theater on 47th Street. It was however, considered important enough to merit an original cast album. I reckon she could sing quite well because she did back-up vocals for other albums in the early 70s. I suppose Gini might have been famous with a few breaks here and there, but her career had to have fizzled out faster than fifty cent fireworks if she descended from Broadway in 1972 to cheapozoid crap like Pick-Up by 1975.

 

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Today the Time Machine travels to 1982 for a "Nudity on the Screen Classic." Phoebe Cates is busting out all over or at least she is in the mind of Judge Rheinhold. An unforgettable moment of celluloid history.

Der Skipper

 

Too bad this movie has never had a decent release, because Liz Hurley shows a lot of skin, but the picture is not good in any of the dozen releases.

Elizabeth Hurley

This is some obscure stuff, but gold for you collectors of the arcane. I didn't have any trouble playing the clips, but the guy who posted them wrote: "For some clips you might need VP7 codec (find it all here: http://www.rapidshare.com/files/39104962/VP7.rar

• Olga Keyzerova in Dafnis i Hloya (Daphnis and Chloe, as we know them. 1993)
• Yelena Kondulainen in the same film Dafnis i Hloya
• Yuliya Menshova in  V toy oblasti nebes (That Part of Heaven, 1992)
• Yekaterina Zinchenko in Taynoe svidaniye (I know nothing about this one. It is not listed in Zinchenko's filmography.)
• Yelena Koreneva in Sibiriada. This one may be the most interesting of the lot. The film was made in 1979, and there was not a lot of nudity in the Brezhnev era, although it could sneak through if done by a respected director and presented in a non-sexual context. This film is directed by the esteemed Konchalovsky, and it is considered his masterpiece. I have not seen it, but the IMDB score is 8.2, and the summary is: "The story about a very small god-forgotten village in Siberia reflects the history of Russia from the beginning of the century till early 80s." Surprisingly, it offers clear frontal and rear nudity in daylight!

A note on Russian orthography. Four of the five Russians above have names beginning in Y. You may wonder why there are so many damned "Y's" in Russian words. Actually, there are not. Russian has a hard and soft version of every vowel, and to speakers of other languages the soft version sounds just like the hard except with a "Y" sound before it. Russians don't necessarily agree with that interpretation, but to us foreigners it sounds like they pronounce about three Y's in every word, especially since so many of their names and nicknames end with "ya" (which is itself just a vowel sound to them, a soft "A," written "Я.") The use of the Y is arbitrary. Some people choose to write the Cyrillic letters without the "Y" when they transliterate them into the Latin alphabet. My daughter is also named Yekaterina, but she spells it without the Y, since the first letter is technically just a "soft e."

Natalie Portman works the stripper pole in Closer, and we see her bottom - in high definition!

Anna Majcher in Czarny Wawoz. (The Black Gorge) Sample to the right

Bibiana Beglau in Unter dem Eis, a well-regarded German thriller from 2005. Sample to the right.

Effie Schou in REKTOR PÅ SENGEKANTEN. Marvin's comments: "Rektor på sengekanten (1972) or 'Headmaster at the Bedside' is another installment in the Danish Bedside series. This one was rather disappointing in the nudity department, but there was at least a striptease scene featuring Effie Schou. I've made a clip of that scene."

Yun Ji-hye in No Mercy for the Rude. A mute hit-man vows to kill only the rude, and save up enough money for tongue surgery. I did not make that up.