Trip with the Teacher (1975)

the audience applauded

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A teacher(Brenda Fogarty)and a group of her female students experience terror first hand on a road trip. Their bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere,of course, and are literally ambushed by three bikers. Jay(Robert Gribbin)is a "Good Samaritan" that moments earlier stopped to help Pete(Robert Palmer)and his brother Al(Zalman King), who just happens to be a sadistic killer. This movie from the Gore House Greats collection is very low budget with brainless dialog and music that is "looped" to annoyance. All three bikers have eyes for the stranded girls, and each with a different agenda. A chilling experience in terror. King is pathetic as the girls are attractive. Other players: Cathy Worthington, Jill Voight, Dina Ousley and Susan Russell.

Fun Movie. Gritty seventies film. Bad acting which makes it good. Is that Deb from "everybody Loves Raymond" in th green dress? It sure looks like her. Her credited actress name is Suzie Russell on this picture. Did she change her name to avoid embarrassment? The film isn't that bad and she didn't flash any skin. This movie was more funny than anything just like the sitcom. Check it out. I think it's her and she should be proud of her acting! I like these movies where I don't know anyone, but it was interesting to see the look-a-like. It kept me interested through the flick. Otherwise I make have turned it off. I think I need to see when Deborah was born and see if it was possibly her.

I can't help but feel that this was Earl Barton's magnum opus, his great artistic statement to the world and an announcement of a great new film-making talent. He wrote the film, directed it, and produced it. He even did some of the music! Yes, this was truly Earl Barton's own Citizen Kane. Why, there's even an "Introducing the Actors" type end credit sequence straight out of Kane! But of course, it was not to be. The first hour of this film is incredibly dull, as the conflict doesn't arise until the last 30 minutes of the film. The performances are mostly dull, so it's difficult to care about the characters. Likewise, the film never quite reaches the same dizzying, sadistic heights of films like The Last House on the Left or The House on the Edge of the Park! The fact that the cast is all smiles by the end of the film and share a group hug is indicative of how goofy this film turned out. The film's saving grace comes in the performance of Zalman King, who is truly one of the most disgusting and despicable villains to grace the screen, sort of a precursor to Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth. While not without its flaws, the performance sells the character's sadism and insanity quite well, and it's obvious that King completely threw himself into the role. Clearly he was going for the Oscar! Thanks to King's performance, as well as some of the film's goofier touches, this still manages to be decent entertainment. If trash auteur Barton had merely cut out most of the screenplay's filler and just cut to the chase, we might have had a real gem on our hands!

The teacher is taking her five teen-aged girls on a field trip to Case Grande in Chihuahua, Mexico. Well, actually, they never make it to Mexico. The bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere and the driver can't fix it. However, three motorcyclists come along and, though they can't fix it either, they are willing to hitch their hogs to the bus and tow it to a gas station.They don't. They tow it down a dusty dirt road to a dilapidated wooden cabin where they hold the teacher and her brood captives.One of the cyclists is an okay dude, having just met the other two on the road. You can tell he's a good guy because he's the only one who wears a safety helmet and doesn't take swigs out of a bottle of hootch. He's aghast when they arrive at the cabin. The bus driver objects as well and is promptly run over and killed.The two bad motorcyclists tie up the good one and walk around menacing the terrified teacher and the nubile girls. The chief bad guy, Zalman King, does nothing but sneer. And that's understandable. King's features are such that his default expression is a sneer. Even when he smiles he sneers. And when he actually TRIES to sneer -- well, just look out, that's all. The guy has a nose on him that beats any other nose in the animal kingdom, a fleshy, drooping protrusion that must have been a horror in itself on the giant drive-in screen. He adds to the effect by wearing a pair of giant wraparound sunglasses tilted upward distally so that he resembles an alien "Gray".Both the bad guys are just out of the slams, and they really are bad, but King is the badder of the two. He gets even worse, if that's possible, when he tries to act. He has these terrific disabling headaches like Cody Jarett. (Kids, you'll have to look that up.) Or maybe Julius Caesar. (You may have to look that up too.) But what does it matter if he can't act? Nobody can act. And the director can't direct, and the sound sounds like mush, and the photographic images are those of an 8 mm. Brownie home movie camera.Here's a sample of the dialog. The good motorcyclist is commiserating over the bus driver's death with one of the girls.Motorcyclist: "Just be glad it wasn't you."Girl: "What do you mean by that?"The girls at least are cute in their diverse ways. Some of them wear skirts so short that one wishes for a time machine. That succulent blond has a magnificent gluteal sulcus. I felt kind of sorry for the brunette with the barrettes in her hair, the one with the narrow shoulders and innocently pinched features. She looks really scared. And then Big Bad Al has to chase her down in the woods, shove her unblemished face into the sand, and smother her without even disrobing her like he did with the teacher.What a skank! But he gets his in the end. The teacher that he raped, pillaged, and debauched gets him from behind and manages to shove an iron pole through his abdomen, back to front, and the director gives Al a full minute of sneering while trying to look agonized, gargling with pain, and slowly stumbling around with his pole sticking through him, before falling to the ground, rolling his head to the side, and being still. This indicates that he's dead.I hardly noticed it. The whole movie was in that condition from the beginning. It would have been of more interest had the tour reached Casa Grande and the director had given us a travelogue of the Mesoamerican community and its historic inhabitants. Did you know that the Aztecs had a kind of currency? They used cocoa beans.