“Pick-up” (1975)
Studio: Crown International Pictures
Starring: Jill Senter, Alan Long, Gini Eastwood
Directed by: Bernard Hirschenson
Rated: R
Running Time: 80 min.
Synopsis: Two girls hitchhike with a guy driving a mobile home that get stuck in a swamp and have a wild trip together.
REVIEW
Chris Woods
From the looks of the poster you think you’re getting a very cool exploitation film. Even from looking at trailers to this film you think it’s about a cool road movie that has lots of sex and violence. Well, I was totally wrong (except for the sex part).
The film is about two girls (Carol and Maureen) who hitchhike with a guy (Chuck) driving a mobile home. Chuck is driving through the state of Florida and needs to drop off the mobile home to Tallahassee by nightfall. What happens is they drive through part of a hurricane and gets stuck in the everglades. So, Chuck and Carol decide to just stay there and walk naked through the swamps and have sex. While Maureen has some trippy moments, hallucinating everything from a woman in a white veil to a creepy clown with balloons. Well, that’s pretty much the movie, until toward the end where Chuck makes it with Maureen too.
There are some flashbacks of the characters, mainly Maureen, where a priest is molesting her. Carol has a flashback about her first sexual encounter and Chuck’s just him messing with a CB radio when he was a kid. There’s also a weird moment where a man running for office comes on the bus campaigning talking to Maureen. At this put I wasn’t sure if he was real or not. I don’t think he was real because they were in the middle of nowhere, and why would he just pop up there like that.
They are some cool psychedelic scenes through out the movie and the two beautiful women are almost naked through out the movie, makes it watchable. The rest of the story, well there really isn’t much of a story, it’s just three people in a swamp, a few flashback and some trippy scenes. Plus there’s a cool scene in the beginning where Carol is dancing in the mobile home and teasing a group of rednecks in a pick-up truck driving in front of them.
The ending really sucks, where Chuck and Maureen go off in the swamp and make love while Carol is left sleeping in the mobile home, well, she wakes up and wanders off into the forest and she is confronted by a gang who try to rape her. The next morning the other two find her body in the swamp with a hand sticking out. Then it cuts to the two girls back where they were in the beginning of the film. It was all a dream. Whatever.