Take an Easy Ride

When the notorious horror/exploitation film "Last House on the Left" was first released in the early 1970's there were apocryphal stories of mothers taking their teenage daughters to see it in order to frighten them away from certain behavior. But if that movie was an exploitation film turned into a kind of PSA (public service announcement), this 40-minute British film is its mirror image--it starts out as a PSA on the dangers of hitchhiking and manages to turn into quite an effective exploitation film complete with rape, murder, lots of full-frontal nudity, and even an incredibly gratuitous three-way sex scene! It's not quite on the level of "Last House on the Left" (which to my knowledge is STILL banned in Britain), but it's pretty damn close.

This short feature is made up of a series of interwoven stories. The main story involves two teenage girls hitchhiking to a rock concert who get in a sports car with a porn-obsessed weirdo (who is mostly shown only via his leather gloves). Another pair of girls have better luck hitchhiking to the (same?) concert with a lorry driver. But all these girls are so ridiculously underdressed the movie kind of ends up inadvertently raising the old saw of whether or not they are "asking for it". A third pair of girls end up being a lot more dangerous to the poor sap who picks them up then vice versa. Even this third story is remotely plausible, I suppose, but the fourth one pretty much sinks the film into utter absurdity, albeit also into unadulterated exploitation: A ridiculously sexy lone female hitchhiker relates an "unpleasant" experience she had hitchhiking where she was picked up by a swinging couple, who get her drunk and involve her in a three-way orgy! This ridiculous, clearly exploitative story sits rather uncomfortably with the more serious "cautionary", and at times genuinely disturbing, ones.

If you have any doubts that this is not foremost an exploitation picture though, check out the CVs of the female cast. Most of them were cast not so much based on their acting abilities as their experience in stripping off in movies like "Groupie Girl" and "Confessions of a Pop Performer". The director was also not very far removed from the homegrown British softcore porn industry. Still, this is certainly worth seeing simply for it's curiosity value. It's hard to find, even in Britain I guess, but I saw a GREAT bootleg of it which also included a number of (American) anti-hitchhiking PSAs, none as weird or exploitative as this one, but all pretty entertaining