While watching Roger Corman's Gas-s-s-s, I was reminded of his earlier film The Trip (1967) where a young Peter Fonda embarks on a surreal and mind-bending LSD trip. Both films feature wild visuals, over-the-top characters, and odd cultural references. Who can forget the scene in The Trip where a midget riding a merry-go-round starts to scream "Bay of Pigs" for no logical reason? Gas-s-s-s, on the other hand, starts with a strange animated sequence where a beefy army general modeled after John Wayne and a German scientist accidentally unleash a deadly gas upon the United States which kills everyone over the age of twenty-five. There's some kind of political statement being said...but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is. And, honestly, I don't think Corman knew, either. My suspicion is that with The Trip and Gas-s-s-s Corman inserted a large amount of politically and socially provocative material just for the sake of being politically and socially provocative. Anything to sell movie tickets, I guess. But despite all of this Gas-s-s-s is a weak, incomprehensible film. Other than its basic premise, I have no idea what Gas-s-s-s is about. All I remember is a bunch of teenagers running around in ridiculous outfits who occasionally stop and engage in shootouts with other bands of derelict teenagers. At some point a group of survivors take shelter in a kind of hippie monastery. But it isn't long before a small army of jocks crossed with Mad Max rejects lay siege upon them and demand that they turn over all of their fruits and vegetables. By that point I had given up trying to decipher this film. I simply didn't care anymore.
4/10
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