I was hoping that this might be a corny 'period piece' like so many from that era. Certainly most of those films are not much in the first place but this one was just really dull. It was like someone's personal story which only they seemed to think of as being interesting. It was not. Most of the story was talk talk talk though there were a couple of odd parts where it seemed someone was on drugs and seeing scary mask faces. Yawn. Someone posted a glowing review of this movie, and I can only say that one would have to have been fried out on drugs to find this movie even more than slightly interesting.
If it's not available on VHS, it should be. But ONLY on VHS. Not on any other media newer than the 1970's. Really just a very poor film.
Hallucination Generation
1966
Drama
Hallucination Generation
1966
Drama
Keywords: psychedelic
Plot summary
A drama set in Spain where a small group of American young adults is living. The leader of the group is a drug dealer. The others are there living carefree lives as beatniks. The leader has more nefarious aims in mind, and uses drugs to lure the others into lives of crime. Most of the film is in black and white, but there is a psychedelic sequence depicting the purported effects of the group using LSD which was filmed in color. Purportedly intended as a warning against the dangers of pill-popping Sixties hedonism along the lines of 1936's Reefer Madness, the film's primary purpose appears to have been titillation, thus landing it in the genre of exploitation cinema.
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Just an awful and boring movie
Bad drugs!
Fairly interminable drugsploitation offering about a group of beatnik types in the Balearic Islands who increasingly experiment with LSD to disastrous effect. It leads them onto a life of crime! Watch out you impressionable fools - those bennies lead to murder! The film is shot in monochrome but kicks into colour when everybody is tripping (that old chestnut). Like a lot of drug films its not really very good unfortunately. I guess this one could be considered a Reefer Madness for the counter-culture generation but it lacks that earlier film's demented wrongheadedness. Just say no!
Junky
"You will experience every jolt...every jar of a Psychedelic Circus...The Beatniks...Sickniks...and Acid-Heads...and you will witness their ecstasies, their agonies and their bizarre sensualities...You will be hurled into their debauched dreams and frenzied fantasies!"
Hallucination Generation is pure exploitation, because it at once wants to be a warning of the dangers of pill popping while also luridly showing the drug experience, even breaking the black and white normal world for the color burst of LSD using the langauge of film that we've all taken from The Wizard of Oz, in that the color world is so much better than monochromatic Kansas.
Ibiza is also a place that I've learned from films like this and More is a den of scum and villainy, a region where rich kids come to get hooked and enter lives of crime to pay for their need to stay high.
This was released by American-International Pictures subsidiary Trans American Pictures, which AIP used to put out the scuzzy films that were too out there for them to release. Look back on that sentence and think about it: movies too messed up for AIP. I'm talking flms like Cannibal Holocaust, Salon Kitty, Jess Franco's Succubus, I Am a Groupie, Witchcraft '70, Teenage Rebellion and more.
Director Edward Mann wrote Island of Terror, Cauldron of Blood, The Freakmaker and Seizure, while directing Hot Pants Holiday, Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow! and Hooch. He's one of those all over the place artists, as he also did the special effects on this movie, contributed the song "There's a Certain Kind of Woman" to Cauldron of Blood, was a syndicated cartoonist, co-founded New York City's Circle in the Square and was one of the forces that made Woodstock a cultural center.
Perhaps even more interesting to genre film fans is that one of the drug addicts, Bill, is played by Danny Steinmann. Yes, the same Danny Steinmann who would go on to make The Unseen, Savage Streets and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning!
Did everyone involved with this movie go on to to be connected to movies I'm obsessed with? Actress Marianne Kanter would go from acting to producing and the two films she did are Blood Rage and Dark August, two dark and scuzzy films that I adore.
Renate Kasché was in everything from Emanuelle in America to Frankenstein '80, Lady Frankenstein and A Black Veil for Lisa. Tom Baker - not Dr. Who - would direct Bongo Wolf's Revenge, which features the Los Angeles fringe eccentric cult figure as he gives a lecture on vampires and prehistoric man. It has Mike Bloomfield - who played on Dylan's albums - and Severn Darden playing themselves and Alan White from Yes as an art critic. You better believe I'm hunting it down.
There's also T.J. Castronovo, who would go on to produce Tales from the Darkside and Spanish character actor Victor Israel, who was in so many movies like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; The House That Screamed; Graveyard of Horror; Ricco; Horror Express; Hell of the Living Dead. He had 211 credits to his name, so he shows up in a ton of stuff.
This is why I watch movies, because even if they aren't good, like this one, you can go down a rabbit hole discovering something better because of the people who appear in it.