-Grindhouse Fest spotlights the cult gems, sleaze classics, and deranged wonders that defined exploitation cinema’s golden run. Proceed with delight and caution-
Directed by Raf Mauro
Written by Ed Adlum and Jack Bravman
Starring:
- Alexis Wassel as Naive College Student
- Don Nevins as College Student
- Barbara Spiegelberg
- Carole Trent
- Joyce Diamond
- Basil Hoffman as Man at Table in Club
- Robert Silver as Teacher with Pipe
Rating: 
The grooviest sexploitation flick of the bunch opens with booze, dope, dancing, and mayhem as a killer LSD chant blasts over what has to be the wildest acid bash in ’60s New York. Raf Mauro gives the roughie playbook a welcome shot of flower-power sleaze, tossing a naïve blonde chemistry major (Alexis Wassel) into the clutches of a gang of free-loving sleazebags who only want her around to whip up the good stuff for their tripped-out orgies.
Getting high, getting laid, and shaking it to a wall of fuzzed-out garage rock, our naïve blonde spirals into one hell of a bad trip, while Raf Mauro’s far-out roughie pieces together the twisted road that led to its deadly, hallucinogenic finale. Told through flashbacks and juicy recollections, Blonde on a Bum Trip wallows in sex, drugs, and violence, mostly as an excuse to crank its smokin’ soundtrack to eardrum-shattering levels while reality melts into one glorious psychedelic mess.
But who the hell gives a rat’s ass about narrative coherence when you’ve got LSD scare flicks, psychedelic panic, and skin-flick excess feeding off each other this beautifully? Certainly not me. Mauro deliriously hijacks the anti-drug cautionary formula, twisting its sanctimonious finger-wagging into an excuse for lurid exploitation, psychedelic weirdness, and one wonderfully warped bad trip.
Besides, how often does a movie with absolutely no clue what it’s trying to say accidentally figure out that the smartest thing it can do is just ride whatever groove the vibes throw its way? With funky optical tricks, editing that couldn’t care less about continuity, jarring transitions, and plotting that feels like it’s being invented on the spot, Blonde on a Bum Trip comes closer than any sexploitation flick to a sleazy French New Wave picture—minus the philosophy, keeping only that itch to tell every filmmaking rule to go screw itself.
