Walk the Walk (1970)

          Walk the Walk has inherent novelty appeal—it seems improbable there is another quasi-psychedelic movie about a middle-aged seminarian forming an intense psychosexual bond with the blowsy prostitute who feeds his heroin habit. Alas, Walk the Walk exists in a different universe from more enduring ‘70s pictures about addiction, so it bears little resemblance to, say, Dusty and Sweets McGee or The Panic in Needle Park, both of which were released in 1971. Bizarrely conceived, haphazardly made, and tonally incoherent, Walk the Walkoften feels like an exploitation flick even though, in its most interesting moments, the picture endeavors to tell a resonant story about characters caught in soul-crushing spirals. The tricky thing about this picture is that it’s too sloppy to qualify as serious cinema, and too thoughtful to get dismissed as trash.
          Bernie Hamilton, a few years before achieving prominence with a regular gig as a police captain on Starsky & Hutch, stars as Mike, who inherited heroin addiction from his mother and now seeks salvation through religious training. When his usual dealer gets busted, Mike connects with Judy (Honor Lawrence), an aging hooker who sells dope as a side hustle. Immediately taken by Mike’s intelligence and sensitivity, she tries and fails to seduce him, then promises that someday he’ll have to pay for a fix with romance. Had writer-director Jac Zacha found a producer willing to develop this material into a grim character study, Walk the Walk could have become something offbeat and touching. Instead, Zacha hooked up with Kroger Babb, who produced a few social-problem exploitation flicks in the ‘50s, and the Mike-Judy material is smothered by a random subplot involving a Satanic cult, the cartoonishly swishy leader of which recently changed his name from “Big Daddy” to “The Unholy One.”
          It’s hard to know whether the makers of Walk the Walk cynically attempted to weave counterculture signifiers into their movie, whether they couldn’t tell bad ideas from good ones, or both. In any event, viewers interested in the Mike-Judy dynamic have to slog through a whole lot of nonsense. In one sequence, Judy officiates a hippie wedding (after Judy asks, “Dost thou take this broad to be thy wife,” the groom replies, “I can dig it”). In another sequence, Mike gets chased through a desert by two cultists, leading to a shot of Mike inadvertently ripping the female cultist’s shirt off as she falls from a high hill. Adding to the fever-dream quality of the picture is a score comprising shapeless acid-rock grooves (as opposed to a proper score that matches the flow of the storyline). And because this is a random ‘70s oddity, the ending is an ambiguous freakout.

Walk the Walk: FUNKY