Hot Summer Week (1972)

          Also known as Girls on the Road, this muddled thriller involves hippie spirituality, horny teenaged girls, a lecherous guru, a PTSD-addled Vietnam vet, and young love that culminates in tragedy. Not only do the elements clash with each other so badly that Hot Summer Week is confusing and disjointed to watch, but each individual element is handled poorly. Despite possessing a certain measure of traffic-accident allure, this is misguided low-budget filmmaking on every level. The story, such as it is, starts when spoiled white girls Debbie (Kathleen Cody) and Karen (Dianne Hull) hit the road for a week’s vacation at a beach house. Right from the beginning, director Thomas J. Schmidt tries to portray the girls as carefree and spunky, but he actually reveals them to be inconsiderate, reckless, and stupid. They drive like maniacs because they’re distracted by activities like tossing bras into traffic, they treat hitchhikers terribly (stealing a guitar from a musician, shunning two would-be passengers for the crime of being flamboyantly gay), and they talk about nothing but their desire to get laid during their vacation. On the way to the beach house, the girls pick up hitchhiker Will (Michael Ontkean), who was recently discharged from an Army hospital after treatment for psychological problems.

          Despite the fact that Will’s twitchy and the fact that he carries a gun in his duffel bag, all Debbie can see is that he’s handsome. Turns out Will is an on-again/off-again resident at a progressive institute run by John (Ralph Waite), a touchy-feely therapist who helps his charges explore love. Karen digs the can’t-we-all-get-along vibe at the institute, but Debbie just wants to make out with Will—up to a point, since she’s all talk. The middle of Hot Summer Week is a mess of heavy-petting scenes, mind-expanding “experiences” at the institute, and silly PTSD flashbacks. (All of Will’s imaginary scenes are processed with a blue tint and a wobbly optical effect, while his war flashbacks seem to comprise stock footage from D-Day.) In the end, Hot Summer Week tries to be a little bit of everything, without committing sufficiently to any one genre—there’s not enough sex for the movie to qualify as an exploitation picture, the spiritual stuff is cartoonish and superficial, and the final sequence transforms Hot Summer Week into a full-on horror movie, complete with an axe-wielding psycho. Just as Debbie and Karen should have driven right by Will, the wise viewer should give Hot Summer Week a pass.

Hot Summer Week: LAME

Superdad (1973)

          The live-action Disney comedy Superdad is awful but weirdly fascinating. Although the title promises one of the studio’s special-effects farces, Superdad is instead a misguided attempt at dramatizing the generation gap. Uptight father Charlie McCready (Bob Crane) frets that his daughter, recent high-school graduate Wendy (Kathleen Cody), is wasting the summer before college; she’s spending all her time with friends including her childhood sweetheart, Bart (Kurt Russell), while waiting to hear if she’s gotten a scholarship to her parents’ alma mater. Charlie’s jazzed about the scholarship possibility because attending the far-away college would separate Wendy from Bart and the gang. Watching TV one night, Charlie hears a pop psychologist suggest that parents should try getting hip to their teenagers’ lifestyles, so Charlie tags along for a disastrous day of beach volleyball and water-skiing. Disgruntled, Charlie slips back into control-freak mode and tricks Wendy into thinking she won the scholarship. Predictably, Wendy goes to pieces when driven away from her friends. At college, Wendy gets “engaged” to a counterculture artist, forcing Charlie (and Bart) to intervene.

          Tiresome in every respect, this movie about the generation gap is, inadvertently, a product of the generation gap—the clueless middle-aged Disney pros behind the camera depict teens as airheaded twits who do nothing but laugh and sing all day, making the kids seem like G-rated hippies. (The scene of the gang driving around while they warble an insipid song called “Los Angeles” against a backdrop of ugly process shots is particularly painful.) Oddly, the adults don’t come off looking much better, since Charlie is less of a Superdad and more of a Superdouche. He lies to his family, maligns the people Wendy loves, scowls at everything, and tries to dominate everyone he meets. It’s also difficult to accept Crane as a squeaky-clean Disney paterfamilias knowing that in his offscreen life, he was a sex addict who ran with a dangerous crowd. As for Disney stalwart Russell, it’s to his great credit that the romantic subplot comes across fairly well, especially since Cody is a bottle-blonde cipher, but his sincere performance belongs in a better movie.

Superdad: LAME