Psych-Out

1968 "The Ultimate Head Trip"
5.9| 1h41m| R| en
Details

Jenny, a deaf runaway who has just arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to find her long-lost brother, a mysterious bearded sculptor known around town as The Seeker. She falls in with a psychedelic band, Mumblin' Jim, whose members include Stoney, Ben, and Elwood. They hide her from the fuzz in their crash pad, a Victorian house crowded with love beads and necking couples. Mumblin' Jim's truth-seeking friend Dave considers the band's pursuit of success "playing games," but he agrees to help Jennie anyway.

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Reviews

Scanialara You won't be disappointed!
Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.
Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
bkoganbing Two of the quirkiest actors of the last half century, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern have roles in Psych-Out about a young deaf mute girl who goes to San Francisco searching for her brother and falls in with some hippies. Nicholson being one of the hippies and Dern being her brother.This film was produced by Dick Clark who was always known as the world's oldest teenager and Clark back in those days tried to stay as close to the youth scene as possible. Psych-Out was his attempt to break from the rock and roll scene that typified the Kennedy administration and get down with the hippie era. He was even behind the times here because in 1968 it was getting a lot edgier and the music reflected it. Imagine not a single reference to the war in Vietnam in this film.It was also supposed to be a message against the use of LSD by the young. I don't think Dick got the message through though. The testament of a lot of drugged out people ten years later was better received. Susan Strasberg is the deaf mute girl who is looking for her brother who has now become some kind of crazed religious zealot. Nicholson is part of a group that plays rock which also consists of Dean Stockwell. He and Stockwell both get ideas about Strasberg.In the meantime poor Dern has gotten the ire of some rednecks and why they have it in for him as opposed to others of the thousands of hippies moved into the Haight-Asbury district back then is never really made clear.Both Nicholson and Dern spend a lot of time working on the distinct mannerisms and speech patter that made them most imitatible in the future. Nicholson wrote the script, but all this film proved is that Jack may have found out he should stay in front of the camera.Psyched-Out is a glimpse of the Sixties as seen through the eyes of the Fifties.
jazzytina I love this movie! Jack Nicholson is so funny and so campy. The premise of the movie really isn't a comedy, and it ends on a depressing note (not too, though). The funniest part of this movie is when Jack and his "band" are performing and play a song that sounds like a bad Purple Haze knockoff. It's so funny to see him then and see him now. This is a great late-Saturday-night with popcorn and beer movie. Not as serious as Easy Rider. Jack is almost giddy throughout this movie. I thought the female lead in this looked a lot like the female lead in "The Savage Seven", but she's a different actress. Dean Stockwell as the stoned philosopher hippie is a riot, too.
definitedoll I purchased this movie recently as one of those "MIDNITE MOVIES", that MGM has put out as a double feature on DVD. I absolutely love this movie. If you want to know what 1968 looked like, really looked like in the hippie world at that time, this movie is for you!Some people might think it's a bad movie, or corny. Well, it's 1968, when people acted more like philosophers than the arrogant, ignorant "HEY YO" types of today. I would much rather have the former than the latter. In my opinion, 1968 was the Best of times, and the Worst of times. We had Vietnam, the end of the Johnson era, and the beginning of the Nixon-Agnew regime. (and those were the good old days!) There was the young people's movement on College Campuses, War Protestation, Untimely demises of leaders such as Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. What was once a small exclusive lifestyle in San Francisco California blossomed into a lifestyle for this country and the entire world ultimately. It was the movements of the mid-late 1960's that still fuel us today!!!Jack Nicholson classes up any movie, and he does so here! I love Susan Strasberg, and there are many other great young actors. Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell, Adam Rourke, to name a few. The music is mostly by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and there is a scene called "The Beads of Innocence" that you shouldn't miss!!! The Colors, the Sounds, the Lights! It's all good!So if you are in a mellow mood to tune in and trip out, then Psych Out is your movie! I give it a full five stars! Loved it!
MisterWhiplash Psych-Out is as much a skewed look at the world of hippies as much as it is a praise-full one- Clark knew that he couldn't show hippies as they really were, despite that he could get filming rights in Haight-Ashbury and other sections of San Francisco, but hey if you're not going for realism, go for ciche! And what ciche it is: Strausberg is a deaf runaway looking in San Fran for her brother, played by Bruce Dern (a near Jesus look-a-like), named the Seeker, and yet instead falls in with a psychadelic rock group called Mumblin Jim, headed by Stoney, Jack Nicholson in a pre-Easy Rider look. The plot is used as a thread to showcase various cliched scenes; the pad filled with hippie-people, the acid-freak out, the scuffle with the fuzz (one of which a young Garry Marhsall), the scuffle with the regular folk, and the music scenes, one of which is a abhorrition on Hendrix's Purple Haze (it's the opening chords played backwards!). Yet, I can reccomend this movie to nostagia-fanatics, ex-hippie film buffs, and for those who'd like to see Nicholson before he started making money in Hollywood, and this is not saying he's bad in this, he's quite good considering the tripe of a screenplay. Another small plus is Kovacs on photography.And hey, don't forget the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the seeds! B