Only in the hippie-'60s or the drug-fueled '70s could such crazy stuff get funding and released to theatres, much less make a considerable profit.
In a way, this is the typical American International Picture, the most greatest of the "B-movie" studios (including Hammer Films & New World). On one hand, it was advertized and sold as a cheap teensploitation movie to make good money off the angry kids who hated the old-authority. Hell, in the pivotal year of hell that was 1968 for America, every extreme that could result of that year is presented.
Yet its made and funded by the same "old" people, who seemed legitimately scared that the hippies would be the anarchy that ends the world.
So its fun to watch such a fantasy to see both dimensions pumped into the narrative, but its better and smarter than it should have been. Plus, like alot of those AIP efforts, you have a great actor hanging around to make the damn thing work....like Hal Holbrook as the politician who inadvertedly sparks off the revolution this side of Franz von Papen.
I mean, the crazy s*** we get from this movie. We have a pop star-turned-President who only seems to complain about the old people in power, and his 4 bastard kids he pays child support for. We get a young Richard Pryor (!) as his drummer. The angry youth get the Constitution remedied to allow 14 year olds to vote and run for Federal Office.
And how they get the votes? Why they spike the D.C. water supply with LSD.
But all that means nothing compared to my favorite bit of insanity: The concentration camps for everyone over 30 years old, with people shipped in Peace sign-bearing buses, to which said old people are in a drug-faze for the rest of their days.
You know, like any other nursing home in our real world.
Ultimately, the pop star-President becomes dictator of America, and the one right idea that I liked honestly was the premise that he and his co-horts become the new abusive authority, with a new generation that's ready to take him down, in a continued never-ending cycle of revolution this side of Latin America.
Really, now we're stuck with these idiotic Direct-to-DVD movies that are gutter-jobs without any experimental smarts or crazyness that we would get from the Roger Corman/AIP days. That is what I miss the most, when the "B-movies" shown at the Drive-In actually beat the big-studio pictures at drive-ins.
Hell, look at the poster. Such an awesome poster, when these days we get this "Floating Heads" crap.
