Steineded How sad is this?

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Scott LeBrun Future soft-core auteur Zalman King does his best David Hess, snarling and sleazing his way through this satisfying exploitation feature. The King plays Al; Al and his less depraved brother Pete (Robert Porter) are bikers who encounter a teacher and her four comely female students on the road. The teacher is Ms. Tenny (Brenda Fogarty), who is taking the girls on a field trip. Circumstances soon lead Al and Pete to bring the gals to an abandoned farmhouse. After committing a murder, the two of them realize that they can't really afford to let the gals live. But first, they're going to have some fun..."Trip with the Teacher" was the sole filmmaking effort for writer / producer / director Earl Barton, ordinarily a dancer / choreographer, so this does seem like an odd choice of material for him. But he makes it work, and the movie is gripping in its tension and sleaze factor. Voyeurs will be pleased to see the clothes come off the gals with some regularity. And the situation is compelling, with the unlikelihood of any saviours coming to the rescue making for a true ordeal for the ladies. Their best bet is with a nice-guy biker named Jay (Robert Gribbin, "Don't Go Near the Park"), who'd made the acquaintance of Al & Pete earlier in the day by offering them some assistance. And adding some unintentional humour is the fact that Tina (Jill Voight) clearly can't run with any speed or sense of urgency. It's no wonder that Al is able to catch up with her.The tone is established fairly early on, with Al deciding to punish an old service station attendant (Edward Cross) basically for being a crotchety fart. The movie isn't totally without laughs, but it mostly concentrates on being grim and gritty.Fogarty is wonderfully spunky, Gribbin is quite likable (as is Jack Driscoll as Marvin the bus driver), and the girls are appealing, especially Dina Ousley ('Bronk') as tough, experienced Bobbie. But "Trip with the Teacher" truly belongs to the marvellously scuzzy King, who's a bad guy par excellence.A worthy viewing for any lover of 1970s drive-in cinema.Eight out of 10.

Goingbegging Four teenage girls and their lady-teacher crossing the desert on a strictly educational tour of ancient America. And a couple of bikers whose minds seem to be on something rather less edifying. It sounds like a recipe for a porn film, though if you want nudity and explicit sex, you'll be disappointed. But don't worry, there's still enough gratuitous violence and sadism to shock your parents. Because that's the level we're at - basically schoolboy fantasy.The little group is faced with everybody's worst desert nightmare, a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, little guessing that the nightmares have hardly started. The two bikers seem rather like the Kray Twins of 60's London, one totally mad (in sci-fi-bug wraparound sunglasses), egging-on a more placid brother. Soon they pull up beside the minibus, and offer to tow it to the service-station. But instead they abduct their captives to a deserted house, where they inflict unspeakable humiliations on them.None of the four girls carry any conviction whatever, except at the scream-queen moments. Even at the beginning, when it's mostly small-talk, they seem to be reading the lines, not playing them. And imprisoned in the house of horrors, they just sit there like guests at a dull party. We know that one of them is meant to be openly randy, and a second one is a puritan virgin. But the other two could be tailors' dummies, for all we discover about them. Brenda Fogarty as the teacher puts a bit more into it, but they missed their chance to cast a proper schoolmarm fantasy-figure. Fogarty just looks like the girl next door.And more faults, perhaps not worth lingering-on. Countless missed opportunities for the girls to escape. The teacher eventually killing the villain by running him through with an iron bar, not too feasible really. Some unsubtle feeding-in of loud birdsong, as though we'd forgotten we were in the wilds. And a terrible ending, with ghostly stuck-on grins by the survivors.Zalman King as the mad brother is the power behind the film, and he went on to become quite a well-known writer/director. At a time when the exploits of Charles Manson were still vivid in the American mind, King seems to have been trying to replicate those wild mood-swings - snarling savagery one moment, spaced-out mumbling the next.Good enough for 16-year old boys, longing to listen-in on girlie-talk and fantasizing about power of life and death over five vulnerable females.

Uriah43 This movie begins with 4 young high school girls and their teacher named "Miss Tenney" (Brenda Fogerty) who are traveling in a school bus on a camping trip to an isolated part of California. On the way they encounter 3 motorcyclists who become interested in them. One of the young men named "Jay" (Robert Gribbin) is a decent fellow but the other two, "Al" (Zalman King) and "Pete" (Robert Porter) are hardened criminals who have recently gotten out of prison and the sight of these females brings out the worst in them. So when the school bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere they seize the opportunity with great relish. Now, rather than disclose any more of the movie and risk spoiling it for those who haven't seen it I will just say this film came with several others in a 2-dvd set called "Drive-In Cult Classics" and I was hoping to find at least one or two good movies in the whole bunch. Unfortunately, this wasn't one of them. Not only were there a number of slow scenes but some of the others were completely ridiculous as well--especially the ending. In any case, while I have certainly seen much worse films in my time, I thought this one might have potential. I was wrong. Accordingly, I rate it as below average.

OldAle1 Zalman King is known today, if he's known at all, as the purveyor (producer-writer-director) of sleazy softcore smut like Red Shoe Diaries - in the early-mid 90s a "Zalman King" film definitely had some meaning in the straight-to-video market, I can tell you.But in the 70s, Zalman King was a struggling actor doing guest shots on network TV series, and appearing in cheesy low-budget exploitation films like Trip With Teacher. Here he's Al, very tall and hook-nosed but otherwise a near dead-ringer for Bono (well, for Bono 15 years later), a creepy and mentally deranged biker who with his more sane but no less unpleasant brother Pete (Robert Porter) is stuck by the side of the road at the beginning of the flick. The brothers have bike problems, but they're soon bailed out by nice-guy motorcyclist Jay (Robert Gribbin) who gets Pete's bike going well enough to get them to the next service station.Along the way the three bikers come upon a school bus with several young women - coy waving and less-coy glances from the 2 brothers for a bit, then all stop at the gas station. I think you might be able to guess where this is headed....if it were made 10-15 years later you'd expect a bloody horror film, but back in these pre-Friday the 13th and Halloween days it's just going to be the two creepy guys trying to have their way with the cute girls and get rid of nice-guy Jay and bus driver Marvin (Jack Driscoll). It's all rather long and tedious - bus breaks down, bikers tow it to near a deserted shack, get rid of driver, seemingly get rid of Jay....and all fairly stupid and silly (how dumb are the girls, Jay and the driver that they don't see that the brothers are sickos? and sickos without any weapons apart from one switchblade...but overpowering them would have been too easy and we wouldn't have a movie and an excuse for some nude scenes) until the kind of cool ending as Jay comes back seemingly from the dead and shows that he's a Real Man after all.The weakest of the three films on the "Drive-in Cult Classics" box set that I've seen so far, but worth it for the cool ending and for King's deranged and freaky portrayal of Al, with one of the creepiest snickering laughs I've ever heard.