I don't know why this movie the impact on me that it did--which is kind of my way of saying I don't know why this movie left any impact on me at all. It's kind of like The Witches' Mountain, another movie I love which, frankly, has so little going for it that it's remarkable that it even still finds release. Really, there's little to separate Blue Summer from other softcore porn exercises of the early '70s, and I can think of little that makes it stand out against other "teen road trip" movies I've seen, to say nothing of the fact that it's not even that distinct from other non-teen road trip movies I've seen. But the High Concept premise sold me quick: "Two teens load up a car with beer and go on the road in search of sexual adventures." I think what made Blue Summer hook into my heart is it's cheap attempts to milk my nostalgia for the road trips of my youth. Sure, I never went on these trips in search of beer or sex--I went looking for ghosts, because I had this weird Gravity Falls-style youth--but the thrill of being young on the open road is something that fades away over time. Maybe it never goes away, but it's never quite the same again. So this crude little porno managed to stir up some strange emotions in me, managing to overcome another fault I had with The Witches' Mountain: I hated it the first few times I saw it.
Gene and Tracy have just finished high school, and soon, horror of horrors, it'll be off to college for the both of 'em. Thus they decide to spend the summer making the trip out to Gene's uncle's cottage, with plenty of stops along the way. The primary mission, of course, is girls, as many as they can bed. Once this premise is established and we've gotten our first few twangs of '70s guitar out of the way, our string of ostensibly erotic vignettes can begin. First our boys run into two girl hitchhikers of around the same age who turn out to be quite permissive. Of course, this is because they expect the boys to be permissive with their valuables. It's implied these two have been running this thumb 'em, bang 'em, and rob 'em for some time. Next, they run into a Manson-esque hippie leader and his two free-loving girlfriends, and that doesn't end well either. At last, they end up in some crap shanty town, where they're offered drunken sex with the village bicycle, Regina. Eventually, however, some thugs show up and butt ahead of the two on the train to Reginasville, and when they decide to fight for their rights to sex it looks like they're going to get their asses kicked. But back near the start of the movie, they ran into the world's most apathetic biker, whom they helped out when his bike wouldn't start. Ever since he's been stalking them with unclear intentions. Turns out he's just been looking to repay the favor, as he fights off the toughs so the boys can get away. When they reach the cottage, Tracy is reunited with an older woman whom he shared an attraction with earlier in the movie, and the two have sex, before realizing they probably shouldn't see each other again when Tracy meets a man older than him who turns out to be the woman's son. Finally, they pack it in, reflecting fondly on the new memories, but also lamenting what comes next.
Because Blue Summer is a porn first and foremost, it spends most of its runtime showing people rolling around and utterly failing at making out. This stuff is easy to fastforward through, unless you want to hear some purebred '70s guitar indulgence, including the occasional not-Beatles. The musical interludes are on par with An American Hippie in Israel for sheer ridiculousness. They highlight the fact that everything about this movie is pure '70s...it's just conspicuously free of drugs, even in the presence of hippies. I think I appreciated it initially by merit of its being a time-capsule film. It is a living memory of something that is, like the road trips of our youth, forever inaccessible. Hell, most of the buildings, forests, and mountains shown in this thing have probably been bulldozed by this point. One needs reminders that the world is always changing, and coming head-to-head with the past is one way of going about that.
There's some actual...heart...in this movie? Like, again, T&A, and tongue-on-tongue, those are the goals, but I get the impression Chuck Vincent, director of such films as Sex Crimes 2084 and Sexpot, actually had something of a personal stake in this film's story. Weird, innit? Any of us who graduated from high school knew it was a bigger step than anything we'd previously known, and that feeling is adequately communicated here. Growing up is scary. It does mean the end of a lot of freedoms that you may go on missing for the rest of your life. But it's also liberating. You get to have your own pets, you can feel the weight of your accomplishments, you can eat whatever garbage you fucking want. And you find that, after a time, you can even still find days to just sit around watching and writing about awesome movies. I can't help but wonder if there is a deliberate irony in that final sadness Tracy and Gene leave us on. One life's ending, but another is just beginning. I mean, if anything, I guess I don't get why they think there's not going to be booze, sex, and road trips in college.
And I think that theme--the fear of growing up--comes back in what is probably the most memorable thread in the film, the affair between Tracy and the older woman. I don't remember if the movie really explains why she ends up going for him; specifically, I don't know if she's meant to be predatory or not. But perhaps this woman fears the future as much as Tracy does, and therefore looks to younger men to help her feel youthful again. There's enough ambiguity that it gives the film depth it didn't have up until everything spills out about her twenty-something son.
I really don't think I can encourage you to watch Blue Summer. It's a relatively tedious run-of-the-mill skin flick, but with a few patches here and there that break up the ennui in ways that I at least found interesting. Let me know if it sticks in your head as well.
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