"Take an Easy Ride" is a British public information film with a heavy dose of sleaze and a bit of rape and sexual violence thrown in.The film features plenty of hippe girls in mini-skirts and some full-frontal nudity.A girl is picked up by a man and his wife,drugged and sexually assaulted by a couple of swingers.Two girls heading to a rock festival hitch a ride with a black gloved sexual pervert who drives them into the woods and then attacks and rapes them.This segment is perhaps the most unsettling.It's obviously influenced by infamous rape and revenge classic "Last House on the Left".So if you are a fan of British sleaze you can't miss "Take an Easy Ride".6 out of 10.
6 Reviews
Brief example of the British exploitation film of the 1970s
Leofwine_draca31 December 2016
Warning: Spoilers
TAKE AN EASY RIDE is a very strange little short film from Britain. It starts out as your usual public information safety film, in which a sonorous narrator warns of the dangers of hitch-hiking and the like, before turning into a scuzzy exploitation thriller in the LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT mould. The version I saw lasted just over thirty minutes so may have been shorn of some of the more explicit sex and violence.
What's astonishing is that films like this were being made in the 1970s. For the first half, this feels very much like a government-funded production, all serious and full of recreations, but in the latter part it just becomes a jumble of dangerous moments, some of them outrageous and some of them quite disturbing. There's a great deal of nudity and sleaze thrown into the mix and given the low budget it has a certain documentary feel to it which adds to its disturbing nature. It's hardly well made, but it is a good, if brief, example of the British exploitation production in the 1970s.
What's astonishing is that films like this were being made in the 1970s. For the first half, this feels very much like a government-funded production, all serious and full of recreations, but in the latter part it just becomes a jumble of dangerous moments, some of them outrageous and some of them quite disturbing. There's a great deal of nudity and sleaze thrown into the mix and given the low budget it has a certain documentary feel to it which adds to its disturbing nature. It's hardly well made, but it is a good, if brief, example of the British exploitation production in the 1970s.
'Slow ride.Take it easy'.
morrison-dylan-fan27 May 2014
Warning: Spoilers
Originally planning to not take a look at the title due to having heard some rather disappointing comments on the movie from my dad.I was recently surprised to see a fellow IMDb'er give the film a good amount of praise,which led to me deciding to get aboard for an easy ride.
The plot:
A group of film makers decide to film reconstructions of hitch-hiking in order to show the danger that people are unknowingly put them selves in.Questioning members of the public,the film makers focus on a woman called Suzanne,who reveals the strange events which occurred when a young couple offered Suzanne a lift to her boyfriends place.Along with Suzanne's unforgettable experience,the film also reveals what can happen when attempting to hitch-hike to a Rock concert,and also reveals what can take place,when hitch-hikers go bad.
View on the film:
Shooting in a mock-doc style,director Kenneth F. Rowles does very well at blurring the lines between fact and fiction,with the talking heads interviews and real location filming giving the title a Public Service Announcement feel,which is matched by a real streak in sleaze,that goes from a swinging couple searching for a new play thing,to a driver leading 2 hitch-hikers to fear for their life,thanks to his large collection of shady magazines.
Sadly,the screenplay by Derrick Slater (who also has a cameo in the movie) is never quite able to match the relish which Rowles displays in his directing style,due to the dialogue being extremely dry and failing to match the fun ride that Rowles takes the viewer on.
The plot:
A group of film makers decide to film reconstructions of hitch-hiking in order to show the danger that people are unknowingly put them selves in.Questioning members of the public,the film makers focus on a woman called Suzanne,who reveals the strange events which occurred when a young couple offered Suzanne a lift to her boyfriends place.Along with Suzanne's unforgettable experience,the film also reveals what can happen when attempting to hitch-hike to a Rock concert,and also reveals what can take place,when hitch-hikers go bad.
View on the film:
Shooting in a mock-doc style,director Kenneth F. Rowles does very well at blurring the lines between fact and fiction,with the talking heads interviews and real location filming giving the title a Public Service Announcement feel,which is matched by a real streak in sleaze,that goes from a swinging couple searching for a new play thing,to a driver leading 2 hitch-hikers to fear for their life,thanks to his large collection of shady magazines.
Sadly,the screenplay by Derrick Slater (who also has a cameo in the movie) is never quite able to match the relish which Rowles displays in his directing style,due to the dialogue being extremely dry and failing to match the fun ride that Rowles takes the viewer on.
Thumbing a hitchhike to hell.
gavcrimson19 September 2003
Warning: Spoilers
SPOILERS INCLUDED
A sure-fire candidate for British cinema's greatest abnormality, this was the handy-work of one Kenneth F. Rowles,who made too few films in the exploitation field but nevertheless they all leave quite an impression. Previously he'd produced Venom (1971) a dreamlike Derek Ford scripted horror film about a sexually phobic girl with a spider fixation,and the above average careerist sex comedy The Ups-and-Downs of a Handyman (1975). But neither of these two,nor any other film for that matter,can really prepare you for Rowles' Take an Easy Ride.
Shot in the style of public information films and ostensibly about the dangers of hitch-hiking, Take an Easy Ride spins several interweaving tales in which this situation is taken to the tragic extreme. Opening with shots of motorways,girls getting into trucks and cheery music,the first off-key note in the film is the narration which attempts an authoritative 'BBC English' voiceover,only to quickly come across like the musings of a curb-crawling Boris Karloff. 'The producers of this film wish to give you the opportunity to judge for yourselves whether hitchhiking should be banned' the narrator tells us-making sure to emphasise the word 'banned'.
Rowles originally envisioned the film as a TV special and the well-meaning intentions seem genuine. That said it also tends to get more kinky and disturbing with every passing frame,eventually subsiding into what can best be described as a sex and horror film amalgamation regularly interrupted by Vox-Pop interviews with the concerned general public. One of the talking heads,pretty blonde Suzanne is asked 'excuse me,do you hitchhike?' She claims she used to but not any more adding 'it's not a pretty story'. A flashback reveals a more 'carefree' Suzanne hitchhiking and being picked up by a jovial young,married couple called Alan and Margaret. As they speed off Alan ominously remarks 'I hope you're not in a hurry',later Alan 'accidentally' gets too drunk to drive and all three stay at a hotel. Predictably the married couple turn out to be sexual predators,and soon a lecherous Alan is taking pictures of his wife in lesbian poses with poor,intoxicated Suzanne. It's a very Wife Swappers moment.
Less the audience think that picking up girl hitchhikers is a swell idea;Take an Easy Ride goes on to spin a vignette about two violence driven babes who rob a transport café of money and a knife. Using the money to buy drugs,the girls end up high as a kite in a field. Psychotically waving the knife around one of the girls remarks she needs 'a whole new scene.a completely different trip'. You just know there's gonna be trouble and sure enough the druggy girls go on to botch robbing a passing motorist who ends up with a knife in the belly for his troubles.
Also bringing insanity to the road is a pornographic magazine reading rapist/murderer. Always shot with his features out of view he's identifiable only by his cap,dark glasses and black gloves. Fired up by images of pornography,this mystery motorist picks up two teenage girl hitchhikers who soon become spooked by his inappropriate questions and dirty magazine collection. In a Last House on the Left manner,as the horror of the situation dawns on them the film continually cuts to one of the girl's oblivious parents. After a struggle the girls run screaming into the nearby woods with a pervert brandishing a knife in hot pursuit. Be in no-doubt had these scenes aired on TV as originally planned Rowles' maniacal-motorist would have become a bogeyman figure in the memory of many a 1970's teenagers. Two other luckless hitchhikers accepting a lift from a man wearing black gloves provides the film's appropriately creepy final shot.
Staggeringly all this is crammed into a mere 44 minutes. Admittedly a brief running time,but you're hardly left feeling short changed given that there's enough material here to keep three or four films going. Milking the topic for all its worth,it's hard to think of any exploitative variation on the hitchhiking theme that doesn't end up in Take an Easy Ride. The film's view that hitch-hiking and picking up hitch-hikers is about as sensible as driving with a blindfold,may seem abit paranoid but Rowles definitely proves his worth as a talented low-budget wiz,economically drawing on various outside sources from scratchy stock footage of the Isle of Wight pop-festival to melodramatic DeWolfe library music,and gelling them all together in a wholly unique manner. Somehow a guided tour around the sights of 1970's Soho (filmed in a nervous handheld-camera way) and T-Rex's 'Get it on' also ended up in the mix as well.
There must be a hundred and one reasons why this film should have commercially fallen between the cracks. Released as bona-fide 'X'-cert exploitation,it's approach is completely at odds with the careerist sex-comedies that dominated the mid-Seventies British box-office (even Wife Swappers auteur Derek Ford had given up the ghost of the 'pseudo-documentary/expose' by 1976) and adding stalker/horror film elements ran the risk of further alienating an audience expecting to see nothing but consequence-free sex. Despite this however the film was a big-success upon its release,being particularly embraced by the denizens of London sex cinemas. Whether men in raincoats would have paid much attention to the film's alarming warnings about hitch-hiking is debatable, the narrator's comment that 'at times you may wish the wife and kids were out of the way as you pass that mini-skirt thumbing a lift' probably earned a few nods though and prurient filmed group sex and leery shots of the mini-skirt set hits the targets that this audience required. If only the Vox Pop fixated Rowles had been there to record the thoughts of an audience stumbling out of Take an Easy Ride-what would they have had to say?
Regrettably Take an Easy Ride has now completely fallen out of circulation and requires some serious legwork to track down. But it's legwork well worth doing. Beg, steal or borrow to find the video release, just don't accept copies from strange men..especially if they're wearing black gloves.
A sure-fire candidate for British cinema's greatest abnormality, this was the handy-work of one Kenneth F. Rowles,who made too few films in the exploitation field but nevertheless they all leave quite an impression. Previously he'd produced Venom (1971) a dreamlike Derek Ford scripted horror film about a sexually phobic girl with a spider fixation,and the above average careerist sex comedy The Ups-and-Downs of a Handyman (1975). But neither of these two,nor any other film for that matter,can really prepare you for Rowles' Take an Easy Ride.
Shot in the style of public information films and ostensibly about the dangers of hitch-hiking, Take an Easy Ride spins several interweaving tales in which this situation is taken to the tragic extreme. Opening with shots of motorways,girls getting into trucks and cheery music,the first off-key note in the film is the narration which attempts an authoritative 'BBC English' voiceover,only to quickly come across like the musings of a curb-crawling Boris Karloff. 'The producers of this film wish to give you the opportunity to judge for yourselves whether hitchhiking should be banned' the narrator tells us-making sure to emphasise the word 'banned'.
Rowles originally envisioned the film as a TV special and the well-meaning intentions seem genuine. That said it also tends to get more kinky and disturbing with every passing frame,eventually subsiding into what can best be described as a sex and horror film amalgamation regularly interrupted by Vox-Pop interviews with the concerned general public. One of the talking heads,pretty blonde Suzanne is asked 'excuse me,do you hitchhike?' She claims she used to but not any more adding 'it's not a pretty story'. A flashback reveals a more 'carefree' Suzanne hitchhiking and being picked up by a jovial young,married couple called Alan and Margaret. As they speed off Alan ominously remarks 'I hope you're not in a hurry',later Alan 'accidentally' gets too drunk to drive and all three stay at a hotel. Predictably the married couple turn out to be sexual predators,and soon a lecherous Alan is taking pictures of his wife in lesbian poses with poor,intoxicated Suzanne. It's a very Wife Swappers moment.
Less the audience think that picking up girl hitchhikers is a swell idea;Take an Easy Ride goes on to spin a vignette about two violence driven babes who rob a transport café of money and a knife. Using the money to buy drugs,the girls end up high as a kite in a field. Psychotically waving the knife around one of the girls remarks she needs 'a whole new scene.a completely different trip'. You just know there's gonna be trouble and sure enough the druggy girls go on to botch robbing a passing motorist who ends up with a knife in the belly for his troubles.
Also bringing insanity to the road is a pornographic magazine reading rapist/murderer. Always shot with his features out of view he's identifiable only by his cap,dark glasses and black gloves. Fired up by images of pornography,this mystery motorist picks up two teenage girl hitchhikers who soon become spooked by his inappropriate questions and dirty magazine collection. In a Last House on the Left manner,as the horror of the situation dawns on them the film continually cuts to one of the girl's oblivious parents. After a struggle the girls run screaming into the nearby woods with a pervert brandishing a knife in hot pursuit. Be in no-doubt had these scenes aired on TV as originally planned Rowles' maniacal-motorist would have become a bogeyman figure in the memory of many a 1970's teenagers. Two other luckless hitchhikers accepting a lift from a man wearing black gloves provides the film's appropriately creepy final shot.
Staggeringly all this is crammed into a mere 44 minutes. Admittedly a brief running time,but you're hardly left feeling short changed given that there's enough material here to keep three or four films going. Milking the topic for all its worth,it's hard to think of any exploitative variation on the hitchhiking theme that doesn't end up in Take an Easy Ride. The film's view that hitch-hiking and picking up hitch-hikers is about as sensible as driving with a blindfold,may seem abit paranoid but Rowles definitely proves his worth as a talented low-budget wiz,economically drawing on various outside sources from scratchy stock footage of the Isle of Wight pop-festival to melodramatic DeWolfe library music,and gelling them all together in a wholly unique manner. Somehow a guided tour around the sights of 1970's Soho (filmed in a nervous handheld-camera way) and T-Rex's 'Get it on' also ended up in the mix as well.
There must be a hundred and one reasons why this film should have commercially fallen between the cracks. Released as bona-fide 'X'-cert exploitation,it's approach is completely at odds with the careerist sex-comedies that dominated the mid-Seventies British box-office (even Wife Swappers auteur Derek Ford had given up the ghost of the 'pseudo-documentary/expose' by 1976) and adding stalker/horror film elements ran the risk of further alienating an audience expecting to see nothing but consequence-free sex. Despite this however the film was a big-success upon its release,being particularly embraced by the denizens of London sex cinemas. Whether men in raincoats would have paid much attention to the film's alarming warnings about hitch-hiking is debatable, the narrator's comment that 'at times you may wish the wife and kids were out of the way as you pass that mini-skirt thumbing a lift' probably earned a few nods though and prurient filmed group sex and leery shots of the mini-skirt set hits the targets that this audience required. If only the Vox Pop fixated Rowles had been there to record the thoughts of an audience stumbling out of Take an Easy Ride-what would they have had to say?
Regrettably Take an Easy Ride has now completely fallen out of circulation and requires some serious legwork to track down. But it's legwork well worth doing. Beg, steal or borrow to find the video release, just don't accept copies from strange men..especially if they're wearing black gloves.
A PSA cum British version of "Last House on the Left"
lazarillo27 June 2009
When the notorious horror/exploitation film "Last House on the Left" was first released in the early 1970's there were apocryphal stories of mothers taking their teenage daughters to see it in order to frighten them away from certain behavior. But if that movie was an exploitation film turned into a kind of PSA (public service announcement), this 40-minute British film is its mirror image--it starts out as a PSA on the dangers of hitchhiking and manages to turn into quite an effective exploitation film complete with rape, murder, lots of full-frontal nudity, and even an incredibly gratuitous three-way sex scene! It's not quite on the level of "Last House on the Left" (which to my knowledge is STILL banned in Britain), but it's pretty damn close.
This short feature is made up of a series of interwoven stories. The main story involves two teenage girls hitchhiking to a rock concert who get in a sports car with a porn-obsessed weirdo (who is mostly shown only via his leather gloves). Another pair of girls have better luck hitchhiking to the (same?) concert with a lorry driver. But all these girls are so ridiculously underdressed the movie kind of ends up inadvertently raising the old saw of whether or not they are "asking for it". A third pair of girls end up being a lot more dangerous to the poor sap who picks them up then vice versa. Even this third story is remotely plausible, I suppose, but the fourth one pretty much sinks the film into utter absurdity, albeit also into unadulterated exploitation: A ridiculously sexy lone female hitchhiker relates an "unpleasant" experience she had hitchhiking where she was picked up by a swinging couple, who get her drunk and involve her in a three-way orgy! This ridiculous, clearly exploitative story sits rather uncomfortably with the more serious "cautionary", and at times genuinely disturbing, ones.
If you have any doubts that this is not foremost an exploitation picture though, check out the CVs of the female cast. Most of them were cast not so much based on their acting abilities as their experience in stripping off in movies like "Groupie Girl" and "Confessions of a Pop Performer". The director was also not very far removed from the homegrown British softcore porn industry. Still, this is certainly worth seeing simply for it's curiosity value. It's hard to find, even in Britain I guess, but I saw a GREAT bootleg of it which also included a number of (American) anti-hitchhiking PSAs, none as weird or exploitative as this one, but all pretty entertaining
This short feature is made up of a series of interwoven stories. The main story involves two teenage girls hitchhiking to a rock concert who get in a sports car with a porn-obsessed weirdo (who is mostly shown only via his leather gloves). Another pair of girls have better luck hitchhiking to the (same?) concert with a lorry driver. But all these girls are so ridiculously underdressed the movie kind of ends up inadvertently raising the old saw of whether or not they are "asking for it". A third pair of girls end up being a lot more dangerous to the poor sap who picks them up then vice versa. Even this third story is remotely plausible, I suppose, but the fourth one pretty much sinks the film into utter absurdity, albeit also into unadulterated exploitation: A ridiculously sexy lone female hitchhiker relates an "unpleasant" experience she had hitchhiking where she was picked up by a swinging couple, who get her drunk and involve her in a three-way orgy! This ridiculous, clearly exploitative story sits rather uncomfortably with the more serious "cautionary", and at times genuinely disturbing, ones.
If you have any doubts that this is not foremost an exploitation picture though, check out the CVs of the female cast. Most of them were cast not so much based on their acting abilities as their experience in stripping off in movies like "Groupie Girl" and "Confessions of a Pop Performer". The director was also not very far removed from the homegrown British softcore porn industry. Still, this is certainly worth seeing simply for it's curiosity value. It's hard to find, even in Britain I guess, but I saw a GREAT bootleg of it which also included a number of (American) anti-hitchhiking PSAs, none as weird or exploitative as this one, but all pretty entertaining
quite disturbing
davies-94 December 2004
having a copy of this film,at first it opens like a travelogue sort of thing with your usual bbc type commentary,then thats just a sweetener for what is to come.we are then given some interview footage from various elements of the globe.on the whole the first half of the film is quite dull(especially the smashie and nicey deejay)and the second half will leave a horrible taste in the mouth.one of the victims appeared as a groupie in confessions of a pop performer.if you can locate this(quite difficult anyway)any fan of British sleaze will be overwhelmed but if not you will be quite disturbed by the whole affair.anyway,they don't make them like this anymore.also a soundtrack in the background by the pretty things.
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