Year: 1976
Duration: 00:38:21
Directed by: Kenneth F. Rowles
Actors: Helen Bernat, Margaret Heald and Pauline Bates
Language: English
Country: UK
Also known as:
Description: When a DVD pops up claiming to be the most notorious British exploitaiton film ever, well you just know we’re going to chasing up a copy. So here we are with a review of Kenneth Rowles’ Take An Easy Ride.Its controversial nature isn’t particularly its content, but in the movie’s history and execution. Let me explain. Originally, Take An Easy Ride was going to be a public information film. Motorways were big business in the UK, as was hitchhiking, so Mr Rowles decided to pitch the idea of a public safery film about the perils of hitchhiking in light of newspaper reports of girls being raped and murdered on the open road. Makes sense – and one commercial station had shown an interest in it. But so had someone else.David Grant, an (in)famous film distributor of adult-interest flicks, saw the early shots of the film. He liked the idea behind it, but wanted to ‘sex it up’ for his cinema audiences. Rowles eventually agreed, taking a fairly tame warning against the perils of the road to something titillating for the backstreet cinemas. It’s that loose and misguided morality which has made Take An Easy Ride such a talked-about relic of the age.
The end product is, I have to say, a strange beast. Mixing ‘real’ opinion on hitchhiking from people on the road with stock rock festival footage and four separate threads of hitchhiking journeys, Take An Easy Ride doesn’t know (or care) if it’s trying to inform, entertain, or shock. Essentially, it just wanted to make money. The first thread of the flick shows two girls (in extremely short skirts, like all the girls featured) getting a lift off a lorry driver. They get to their destination, no-one is hurt. The world is still a good place. The second flips the coin, as a well-meaning man gives two girls a lift down the road. They’re wrong ‘uns and after already being seen robbing a cafe for money and a knife, they rob the driver, stabbing him viciously as an afterthought. Things have turned dark.
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