review

TRIP WITH THE TEACHER

A concoction of biker, rape, and revenge flicks, producer/writer/director Earl Barton's TRIP WITH THE TEACHER tosses another unholy ingredient into it's already depressing mix: utter boredom. Here's a quick recap: Four female students and their teacher are on their way into the desert for a field trip when they run afoul of a trio of bikers. After killing the guy driving the girl's bus, the bikers take their young prey to an old, abandoned cabin to finish them off - but not before enjoying themselves. Sounds like a good sleazy time, doesn't it? Well, don't get too excited. TRIP WITH THE TEACHER takes a premise ripe with exploitative promise and completely fucks it up.


Trip With The Teacher

It's not very hard to make these kinds of films work. It simply isn't. For a revenge film to work, you have to have villains that do incredibly awful things in order to get the audience to cheer on their eventual demises. Otherwise, the revenge aspect doesn't carry any weight with it. The Rape/Revenge film operates on this level. We want the bad guys to get it and get it bad because their actions were so reprehensible. If the filmmaker withholds the violence perpetrated on the victims, the film will not work. In TRIP WITH THE TEACHER, we see the beginning of two rapes, but not the acts themselves. The closest the film gets to anything outrage worthy is the suffocation of one of the young girls, her face pressed into the ground until she stops breathing. It's an effective scene but not enough on it's own to spark our hatred. Anyone who has seen one or two of these films knows this to be true. Unfortunately, Mr. Barton must not have been paying attention.


Zalman King in Trip With The Teacher

A revenge film also needs a menacing villain. TRIP WITH THE TEACHER doesn't have one. It's lead psychopath, Al, is played by Zalman King, an absolutely talentless actor who looks like a hair metal version of Geddy Lee. Wearing giant Blue Beetle sunglasses, Al is the kind of character that David Hess played so often and so well. He's obviously supposed to be out of his mind, hence all the constant giggling and hair pulling, hissy fits and crying spells, but he simply cannot pull it off in a manner that is in any way believable. It's Al's idea to get rid of the girls in order to cover up his killing of the bus driver but, aside from raping the teacher, he spends most of the running time doing absolutely nothing to them. He just sits in the corner and stares. Very frightening.


Earl Barton's Trip With The Teacher

Most of the girls look like they're in their very late twenties and none of them are very willing to show the goods. They're also an incredibly uninteresting bunch with no really likeable character. Not good for winning audience sympathies. The violence is strangely bloodless - two ketchup packs worth for an impalement! - and the motorcycle chases have obviously been filmed at low speeds and then sped up in post, giving the riders this strange jerky look as they roll on and on and on in straight lines. Lapses in logic come fast and furious. After her rape, the teacher spends the rest of the movie in an adjacent room all alone but never makes a break for it even though there are gaping holes in the wall and no windows! She just sits there for the rest of the movie. A character takes a fall off a cliff and comes away without a scratch. All those things might endear TRIP WITH THE TEACHER to the "so bad it's good" crowd but not to me.


TRIP WITH THE TEACHER is an absolute waste of time.


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