Barry Shear

This is a great slice of counter-culture-hopping, generation gap-creating, acid-fried lunacy from AIP. It opens with Max Flatow (Christopher Jones) as a put upon child who cooks LSD in his basement before becoming a multi-millionaire rock star by the age of 22. With an entourage of precocious kids around him he becomes the world’s most popular youth entertainer and is soon attracting the attention of ambitious politician John Fergus (Hal Holbrook) who wants to use Frost to win the youth vote to gain entry to the Senate. Frost goes along for a while, but soon enters the political arena himself. With the voting age lowered to 15 and with his youth “troops” on the street he soon wins the Presidency and begins enacting radical new laws, including everyone over the age of 30 being confined to “camps" where they are forced to take daily doses of LSD.

Written by Robert Thom and directed by Barry Shear, the film is a clever exploitation of mainstream concerns about the rise of the counter-culture, youth culture and inter-generational tensions. Although it now looks rather camp, at the time the film was an easy extrapolation of the current trends, with mainstream fears about hippies spiking the water supply with acid through to the youth movement taking over the streets all being giddily and whole-heartedly exploited. Some of the dialogue is now supremely dated and comes across as wildly ironic and funny; I’m not sure if some of the dialogue would ever have been hip even in 1968. Christopher Jones is brash and charismatic in the lead role and is surrounded by a great cast including an over-the-top Shelly Winters as his over-bearing mother who moves from being a neurotic nest-builder into a kaftan-sporting acid proselytizer. Hal Holbrook is business-like as the conniving politician; a young Richard Pryor is laid-back cool as Stanley X, a hippie who spikes the Washington water supply with acid and Ed Begley is great fun as the crotchety straight politician who becomes a manically-laughing, blissed-out groover after getting turned-on to mind-altering delights of LSD. The film is full of great songs, the majority by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (as well as a couple by Les Baxter) whose faux-psychedelia gives them a weird charm and strangely as much (if not more) psych punch as the genuine psychedelic noodling’s of the time. “Wild in the Streets” is a great, joyful, fun movie and very much of its time, but who’s to say that its youthful underlying message isn’t as relevant today as it was then, babies!… (altro)