Trip with the Teacher

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.

Another movie released as part of the Drive-In Cult Classics Collection. This movie involves 2 brothers motorcycling through the southwest who come upon a bus load of girls on a summer trip with a teacher. At the outset, one of the brothers name Pete (Robert Porter) seems somewhat normal. His brother Al (Zalman King), however, is somewhat crazy and apparently had already spent some time in prison. They ride with a third biker Jay (Robert Gribbin) who had stopped to help Pete fix a flat. The trio of bikers meet up with the bus which has broken down in the desert. Al only has one thing on his mind and that is scoring with the girls. We know he has already killed a garage mechanic. Miss Tenny (Brenda Gogarty) is the teacher traveling with the girls and feels it is her responsibility to protect them as Al gets aggressive. When the bus driver tries to stop Al from harassing the girls, Al and Pete chase him down on their motorcycles and kill him. Al quickly realizes that he can't leave any witnesses around. Al (who later did some writing, directing and producing for the Red Shoes Diaries), carries the movie as we try to anticipate his next move. But overall, the movie is slow moving with two of the girls not really saying much throughout the movie. Even Pete is disappointing as he gets drunk and just sits around. At the end, Jay tries to be a hero but he needs the help of Miss Tenny to finish off their tormentors.

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source: Trip with the Teacher

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 * 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.

The teacher is taking her five teen-aged girls on a field trip to Case Grande in Chihuahua, Mexico. Well, actually, they never make it to Mexico. The bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere and the driver can't fix it. However, three motorcyclists come along and, though they can't fix it either, they are willing to hitch their hogs to the bus and tow it to a gas station. They don't. They tow it down a dusty dirt road to a dilapidated wooden cabin where they hold the teacher and her brood captives. One of the cyclists is an okay dude, having just met the other two on the road. You can tell he's a good guy because he's the only one who wears a safety helmet and doesn't take swigs out of a bottle of hootch. He's aghast when they arrive at the cabin. The bus driver objects as well and is promptly run over and killed. The two bad motorcyclists tie up the good one and walk around menacing the terrified teacher and the nubile girls. The chief bad guy, Zalman King, does nothing but sneer. And that's understandable. King's features are such that his default expression is a sneer. Even when he smiles he sneers. And when he actually TRIES to sneer -- well, just look out, that's all. The guy has a nose on him that beats any other nose in the animal kingdom, a fleshy, drooping protrusion that must have been a horror in itself on the giant drive-in screen. He adds to the effect by wearing a pair of giant wraparound sunglasses tilted upward distally so that he resembles an alien "Gray". Both the bad guys are just out of the slams, and they really are bad, but King is the badder of the two. He gets even worse, if that's possible, when he tries to act. He has these terrific disabling headaches like Cody Jarett. (Kids, you'll have to look that up.) Or maybe Julius Caesar. (You may have to look that up too.) But what does it matter if he can't act? Nobody can act. And the director can't direct, and the sound sounds like mush, and the photographic images are those of an 8 mm. Brownie home movie camera. Here's a sample of the dialog. The good motorcyclist is commiserating over the bus driver's death with one of the girls. Motorcyclist: "Just be glad it wasn't you." Girl: "What do you mean by that?" The girls at least are cute in their diverse ways. Some of them wear skirts so short that one wishes for a time machine. That succulent blond has a magnificent gluteal sulcus. I felt kind of sorry for the brunette with the barrettes in her hair, the one with the narrow shoulders and innocently pinched features. She looks really scared. And then Big Bad Al has to chase her down in the woods, shove her unblemished face into the sand, and smother her without even disrobing her like he did with the teacher. What a skank! But he gets his in the end. The teacher that he raped, pillaged, and debauched gets him from behind and manages to shove an iron pole through his abdomen, back to front, and the director gives Al a full minute of sneering while trying to look agonized, gargling with pain, and slowly stumbling around with his pole sticking through him, before falling to the ground, rolling his head to the side, and being still. This indicates that he's dead. I hardly noticed it. The whole movie was in that condition from the beginning. It would have been of more interest had the tour reached Casa Grande and the director had given us a travelogue of the Mesoamerican community and its historic inhabitants. Did you know that the Aztecs had a kind of currency? They used cocoa beans.

"A chilling experience in terror as a group of female students and their pretty teacher are ambushed, while on a field trip, by a sadistic killer and his brother, forcing the women to learn a lesson in survival." Well, not quite. It's really just about a bunch of horny female students who go on a field trip with their teacher, sounds exciting doesn't it? While on this "trip" they run into some perverted motorcycle hippie-rapists, who the girls get all turned on by. I'm not even going to bother going into detail why this film is so bad, you're just going to have to watch it for yourself or read a different review. I don't recommend this flick for anyone, it's a whole hour and thirty one minutes you will never get back. Trip With the Teacher is not an underrated film, if anything it's an overrated one.

Trip with the Teacher is standard exploitation fare that just doesn't fully embrace what it is supposed be, namely, exploitive. The premise has the right formula of sleazy ingredients: Miss Tenny and her group of gorgeous twenty-something women exploring remote desert vistas are joined in their travels by three wayward bikers and are soon stranded somewhere in the desert. After the mentally unstable Al, played by Zalman King in all his face contorting madness, runs down the bus driver in one of his many fits of rage he talks his laid back and seemingly stoned brother Pete into eliminating any witnesses. Unfortunately for them the brothers rode along with good samaritan Jay who attempts to protect the utterly useless women from these two buffoons. Of course Jay manages to screw that up leaving the lovely ladies to fend for themselves by cowering in corners of a dilapidated shack. This is what drove me insane. The women constantly outnumbered their captors and could have easily escaped if they all weren't so helpless. What would be more satisfying than watching a bunch of half-naked tormented women tearing these guys to death? It's an exploitation movie! Exploit! Zalman King with his humongous bug-eyed sunglasses is more annoying than terrifying as his bouts of madness consist of a mess of hair, nose, and giggling. The only redeeming quality of this film is the beautiful women in various states of undress. I was particularly enamored with the bad girl portrayed by the stunning Dina Ousley. With her yellow short-shorts she is definitely the hottest thing in the desert. Trip with the teacher does capture the feel of the early seventies southern California hippie biker culture well. Sadly, after you watch it once you will have no desire to see it again.

This was a mediocre grindhouse flick for me. If it wasn't for the fame of Zalman King I guess you wouldn't have seen it that much. Zalman became famous in the eighties for producing erotic flicks. Most of the actresses played in grindhouse flicks but Cathy Worthington was the one who made it into the scene even appearing in Dallas, Jill Voight was seen in Friday The 13th Part 2. As I said, grindhouse and of that kind with the bad bikers in it. We had so many in it but due Zalman this do stands out because Zalman really carries this flick. It is a bit slow and campy sometimes, just watch the tow scene with the bus. The quality of the movie itself was really bad, even on DVD, a lot of scratches, bad sound and hiss. It really takes you 45 minutes before the girls are getting a bad trip with their teacher after their bus broke down and the bikers come in handy. Of course as a grindhouse there is a bit of nudity but not to mention. Not really my cup but a must have due the well known reasons explained earlier.

You should know what you're going to get from this low-cost midnight drive-in schlock that represents the sleaze and sadism in a decade of scuzzy low-brow exploitation. It gets all the ticks of being raw, gritty and sordid. Yes, it's rough around the edges and director Earl Barton's minimal handling makes sure it works to its strengths, and surprisingly strikes up a bit of tension, and unease. However it couldn't escape that cheesy daftness, which loomed largely by its repetitively funky and racy music score. It was quite an unusual one though, which doesn't always fit in. The shallow story is plain and simple, if a little meandering from time to time and few senseless occurrences are hard to believe. I don't know how many opportunities arose to escape, or do something, but everyone seemed happy to sit and watch. While the obvious script starts off awkwardly and melodramatic, it then gains control and builds tension. Sure it isn't first-rate, but it holds your interest and includes a surprise or two. Performances are workable enough. Zalman King terrifically chews it up as the menacingly neurotic loon biker, that along with his brother (played placidly by Robert Porter) go onto terrorise a small group of teenage school girls (Cathy Worthington, Dina Ousley, Susie Russell and Jill Voight pull off their parts), teacher (a fiery Brenda Fogarty), and a fellow biker (a fine Robert Gribbin) in the forlorn California desert. Due to the relaxed pacing, it gives you time to soak up the situation and the harshly captured bare-desert backdrop that complements the bare-knuckle survival tag. Then it pulls out the punches, and ups the notch. Some of the action scenes are over-the-top, and corny but amusing. The cruel violence is sexually scathing, and nasty. While we see little flesh, the leering camera-work focuses on the scummy side of things, and can get up within the action. That bad… not that bad. Definitely nothing special though, but the intensely bold theatrical turn of King makes it worth-a-peek.