OTTO PREMINGER'S COUNTER-CULTURE DISASTER OF 'SKIDOO'

Year: 1968 Rating: *

For their time and in a matter of aesthetics, Otto Preminger's Film Noirs LAURA and FALLEN ANGEL (both with Dana Andrews) were "psychedelic" for their time, with a camera-gliding flow; yet there's NO flow here in the 1960's when flowing supposedly meant everything... In fact the camera's mostly stagnant, glued upon the now infamous idiocy as if SKIDOO were a two-hour Laugh-In skit...

Alexandra Hay painted in Skidoo

There's a certain style of movie or show needed for LSD viewing; take it from yours truly, a former 1980's teenage acid head who dropped two tabs of white blotter to experience the VHS tapes of PINK FLOYD LIVE IN POMPEII (not the awful director's cut) and then, after two more hits, another collage-style experience, Bob Dylan DON'T LOOK BACK...

Dylan who Preminger, experimenting with LSD at the time, requested to score this mess about Jackie Gleason as a mafia hit-man married to an intentionally annoying Carol Channing... He's sentenced to a futuristic-looking Alcatraz who decides NOT to kill a friend/convict ratting on the chief mobster because... well... all that doesn't matter but at the same time, the plot's always being pushed at the audience, which is what NOT to do when trying to make something relevant to, or entertaining for, cinema-going Acid-Heads: But no matter the target audience, SKIDOO is just plain bad, and even worse than that, boring.

Groucho Marx getting screwed for SKIDDO

Meanwhile the otherwise talented Harry Nilsson's soundtrack is like brain-dead children's music...

Which is how the cookie-cutter young hippies are depicted (led by a wooden John Phillip Law and a gorgeous Alexandra Hay) against the backdrop of a zany mafia-crime-genre parody starring horribly exploited has-been old-timers...

From Mickey Rooney to Slim Pickens to Fred Clark to Groucho Marx, all who wind up tripping on acid while acting as if they drank too much champagne at a wedding...

Proving it's an extremely difficult if impossible high to imitate since people don't act one way or another on acid... 

Cameras don't capture the electrified flashes in one's mind that makes exterior images pulsate (manipulating what's actually already there as opposed to making the user hallucinate what's not... which happens after days on speed, not LSD). And that baking brain MUST HAVE good music to REALLY work, so... Tune in and drop out, fine: But not here, because, if you don't have a bad trip you'll have a downright lousy one.