lonchaney20 I can't help but feel that this was Earl Barton's magnum opus, his great artistic statement to the world and an announcement of a great new film-making talent. He wrote the film, directed it, and produced it. He even did some of the music! Yes, this was truly Earl Barton's own Citizen Kane. Why, there's even an "Introducing the Actors" type end credit sequence straight out of Kane! But of course, it was not to be. The first hour of this film is incredibly dull, as the conflict doesn't arise until the last 30 minutes of the film. The performances are mostly dull, so it's difficult to care about the characters. Likewise, the film never quite reaches the same dizzying, sadistic heights of films like The Last House on the Left or The House on the Edge of the Park! The fact that the cast is all smiles by the end of the film and share a group hug is indicative of how goofy this film turned out. The film's saving grace comes in the performance of Zalman King, who is truly one of the most disgusting and despicable villains to grace the screen, sort of a precursor to Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth. While not without its flaws, the performance sells the character's sadism and insanity quite well, and it's obvious that King completely threw himself into the role. Clearly he was going for the Oscar! Thanks to King's performance, as well as some of the film's goofier touches, this still manages to be decent entertainment. If trash auteur Barton had merely cut out most of the screenplay's filler and just cut to the chase, we might have had a real gem on our hands!

amosduncan_2000 I finally saw "Trip With Teacher" on my wonderful five dollar K Mart "Grindhouse Greats" collection. Some observations that have not yet been made. There are some complex, if strange ideas bouncing around this seemingly real dumb movie. First, Zalman's character, if viewed objectively, seems to be trying to stay out of trouble, yet circumstance seems to keep dragging him and his annoying little laugh into trouble. Early on he makes a play and tries to grab the the teacher's breast, which might have been enough to have them write him off. Yet they keep INVOLVING him..... The "hero" is a real wuss who could basically saved the day at anytime. His survival of a (well staged) fall to his death is not believable. But if he got up, why doesn't he go for the cops in the first place.The strange scene where Zalman smothers the nicest of the good girls to death, and seems to have an a sexual climax without undressing. Murder is sex to this guy, I guess. The teacher is all happy at the end and seems to have completely forgotten about the murdered girl or the dead bus driver for that matter. Is She the real bad guy? All in all, an interesting low budget affair.

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.

MisterWhiplash Watch Trip with the Teacher with a big, whiskey-soaked grain of salt: it's a grindhouse flick, not really a drive-in flick as advertised with its most recent DVD release. Earl Barton knew what he was doing, he was shooting a story that is filled with lots of real good vs evil characters (with maybe one that at one point is kind of gray-area), where good is good and pure and innocent and evil is just flat out f***ing deranged. Even the print on the recent DVD release compliments the picture: it's scratchy, faded, there's a few frames here and there that are just missing or cut out of a scene of dialog or action. It's not meant to be some great movie, but for what it's worth it's a lot of fun and it also takes its sadistic characters as seriously as possible.Here's the premise: a bus of schoolgirls lead by Miss Tenny to seek out some mountains or something (who cares really, it's just some place in the middle of the desert) are harassed, gingerly at first and then not-so-much, by a couple of greasy bikers (Zalman King as one of them, distinctive with his alien-sized sunglasses) who catch them at a weak spot- their bus breaks down and need a lift. They're taken to a cabin even more in the middle of nowhere, and various rape and murder is then set as the bikers' task. As with other movies of this ilk, not just exploitation in general but more specifically with bikers, there's one good biker in the trio who tries to save the women from certain destruction. But it won't be that easy... in fact, for a large chunk of the running time, Trip with the Teacher is almost as sadistic in nature as Last House on the Left.Except, in the case of the film-making, it's a lot more skillful and entertaining, with dialog that sounds so trashy you'd hope it was ripped out of text books of high-schoolers (there's one line from a girl about being raised by the bible that's a riot). And there's also Zalman King, who plays one of the sickest, most deliciously wicked and insane villains of the 70s. Strange that a man who is touted for his work on soft-core porn could actually pull out a convincing performance: it's at first seemingly hammed-up, but it's really vicious in that way that's memorable. The rest of the acting ranges from decent to forgettable (two of the girls barely utter a word of dialog for the bulk of the time spent at the cabin), but why carp? Anyone watching Trip with the Teacher is watching it for one thing above all else: skillfully directed trash.It's better than it has any right to be, but that goes without saying that it knows what it is: this is like one of the rare good pieces of movie-lore that inspired Tarantino and Rodriguez with their pictures: it's unrepentant in its conventions and split of black-and-white, and it's played out to its full extent.