Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The heyday of the drive in began with low budget horror flicks and eventually morphed into low budget T&A movies. The films almost always took on some form of profession from student nurses to cheerleaders to teachers. Surprisingly while the titles may have made it seem that those in these chosen professions had the loosest of morals the films themselves actually were a bit more twisted. Yes, the characters were placed in definite misogynistic settings but they were also the most independent women on the planet. In the end while bad things happened they came out stronger, more self-aware and better off than their male counterparts.All of that can be seen in TRIP WITH THE TEACHER. The name itself sounds like a low grade porn flick but it is far from it. The movie features a teacher on a field trip with a group of female students. Their destination is the desert area of the southwest. Side by side with their adventure is a motorcyclist who teams up with two other young bikers, brothers, one of which has a flat. What he doesn't realize is that one of them tends to lean towards anti-social psychopathic tendencies.Their paths cross as they pass the bus and the girls flirt with them. When both end up at the next gas station they chat, the girls flirt some more and then head out on their way. Al (Zalman King), the psycho brother, kills the station attendant who was giving them a hard time without telling the other two, and their on their way.The girl's bus breaks down and the cyclists offer to help them. At least they claim to. Instead they kill the driver, assault the girls and eventually rape the teacher who offers herself up if they'll leave the girls alone. The third biker isn't part of this and is attacked by the brothers and left for dead. Now if only the girls can find a way to escape.The movie features everything that those drive in movies looked for. We have sexy young girls, none of which looks under 25 even though they're playing teens. We have psycho bikers because hey, all bikers must be psychos right? Well with the exception of the one riding the old style motorcycle. We have a secluded location which works out great since the budget is miniscule at best. And the end result involves a form of revenge which was a classic plot device in these films.The movie looks much like it would have on the large whitewashed screens of the drive in with little attention paid to focus or a decent film stock that would have provided a better picture. But these movies weren't made as art. They were quickly written, quickly shot no budget films that made back more than their investment playing from one end of the country to another. This one is a bit less than most which makes me think it was the second half of a double bill along the way.The acting is high school level at best. Like I said, no one seems to fit the age that they are portraying. King always seemed to play characters like this one so his showing up here allows the audience to know right off the start he's the bad guy. His is the only character that really stands out here seeming like a method actor looking for some method to play the part.With all that being said this is another of the films saved by Vinegar Syndrome. No, this isn't CITIZEN KANE in that it deserves major restoration and placed in a locked vault. But the movie itself depicts the type of film being made when it was released, a style of film made specifically for drive ins. The film company behind it, Crown International Pictures, was a company that made tons of movies for drive ins. They may not have been the best of the best but their history deserves to be preserved.Vinegar Syndrome is presenting the film in the best way possible with plenty of extras on hand. To begin with the film is a 2k restoration from a 16mm original camera negative. There is a commentary track with director Earl Barton, actress Cathy Worthington and actress Dina Ousley, TAKING THE TRIP a video with actress Brenda Fogarty who plays the teacher, multiple TV spots, a still gallery and reversible cover artwork.If you're a fan of drive in or grindhouse films then this is yet another film to add to your collection.

This movie starts out reminding me of the even more awful film "Manos: the Hands of Fate" as you see a vehicle driving through the countryside. The vehicle in question is a bus and yes I do believe it is the short bus because everyone in it is incredibly stupid from the teacher, to the students, and even the bus driver. And speaking of stupid, one dude comes across two brothers, one of whom has a bad wheel on his motorcycle. The guy proceeds to offer his assistance, no harm there, but then he keeps on driving with them like they have been friends forever and they all proceed to stalk the girls on the bus. The girls are very cute and have that 70's natural look I love, in fact all the girls look like the cuties from the porn film "Little Girls Blue". Though none of them were actually in that film. The bus eventually breaks down and the one of the brothers really shows his colors to the teacher, the dude who was helping, and the girls and they still let themselves be towed into the middle of nowhere. I am not sure if the helpful guy would have even minded the crazy guy dropping a car on some old dude in the gas station if he had seen it. Pretty soon the crazy guy and his brother hold the others hostage even though there are two of them and six of the others. The idiots had ample times where the crazy guy would just fall to the ground having a fit and they would just watch. At one point the one girl could have smashed the other brother with a bottle, but did not. In the end this film was rather boring, needed more nudity not the violent stuff, but maybe a scene with the girls taking their tops off to skinny dip. Virtually no blood, which is kind of strange considering I got this in a twelve pack of movies called Gorehouse legends. I would say it is nice to look at the pretty 70's girls and the crazy guy's performance as it is well done. Other than that you are not missing much.

Zalman King is known today, if he's known at all, as the purveyor (producer-writer-director) of sleazy softcore smut like Red Shoe Diaries - in the early-mid 90s a "Zalman King" film definitely had some meaning in the straight-to-video market, I can tell you.But in the 70s, Zalman King was a struggling actor doing guest shots on network TV series, and appearing in cheesy low-budget exploitation films like Trip With Teacher. Here he's Al, very tall and hook-nosed but otherwise a near dead-ringer for Bono (well, for Bono 15 years later), a creepy and mentally deranged biker who with his more sane but no less unpleasant brother Pete (Robert Porter) is stuck by the side of the road at the beginning of the flick. The brothers have bike problems, but they're soon bailed out by nice-guy motorcyclist Jay (Robert Gribbin) who gets Pete's bike going well enough to get them to the next service station.Along the way the three bikers come upon a school bus with several young women - coy waving and less-coy glances from the 2 brothers for a bit, then all stop at the gas station. I think you might be able to guess where this is headed....if it were made 10-15 years later you'd expect a bloody horror film, but back in these pre-Friday the 13th and Halloween days it's just going to be the two creepy guys trying to have their way with the cute girls and get rid of nice-guy Jay and bus driver Marvin (Jack Driscoll). It's all rather long and tedious - bus breaks down, bikers tow it to near a deserted shack, get rid of driver, seemingly get rid of Jay....and all fairly stupid and silly (how dumb are the girls, Jay and the driver that they don't see that the brothers are sickos? and sickos without any weapons apart from one switchblade...but overpowering them would have been too easy and we wouldn't have a movie and an excuse for some nude scenes) until the kind of cool ending as Jay comes back seemingly from the dead and shows that he's a Real Man after all.The weakest of the three films on the "Drive-in Cult Classics" box set that I've seen so far, but worth it for the cool ending and for King's deranged and freaky portrayal of Al, with one of the creepiest snickering laughs I've ever heard.

Watch Trip with the Teacher with a big, whiskey-soaked grain of salt: it's a grindhouse flick, not really a drive-in flick as advertised with its most recent DVD release. Earl Barton knew what he was doing, he was shooting a story that is filled with lots of real good vs evil characters (with maybe one that at one point is kind of gray-area), where good is good and pure and innocent and evil is just flat out f***ing deranged. Even the print on the recent DVD release compliments the picture: it's scratchy, faded, there's a few frames here and there that are just missing or cut out of a scene of dialog or action. It's not meant to be some great movie, but for what it's worth it's a lot of fun and it also takes its sadistic characters as seriously as possible.Here's the premise: a bus of schoolgirls lead by Miss Tenny to seek out some mountains or something (who cares really, it's just some place in the middle of the desert) are harassed, gingerly at first and then not-so-much, by a couple of greasy bikers (Zalman King as one of them, distinctive with his alien-sized sunglasses) who catch them at a weak spot- their bus breaks down and need a lift. They're taken to a cabin even more in the middle of nowhere, and various rape and murder is then set as the bikers' task. As with other movies of this ilk, not just exploitation in general but more specifically with bikers, there's one good biker in the trio who tries to save the women from certain destruction. But it won't be that easy... in fact, for a large chunk of the running time, Trip with the Teacher is almost as sadistic in nature as Last House on the Left.Except, in the case of the film-making, it's a lot more skillful and entertaining, with dialog that sounds so trashy you'd hope it was ripped out of text books of high-schoolers (there's one line from a girl about being raised by the bible that's a riot). And there's also Zalman King, who plays one of the sickest, most deliciously wicked and insane villains of the 70s. Strange that a man who is touted for his work on soft-core porn could actually pull out a convincing performance: it's at first seemingly hammed-up, but it's really vicious in that way that's memorable. The rest of the acting ranges from decent to forgettable (two of the girls barely utter a word of dialog for the bulk of the time spent at the cabin), but why carp? Anyone watching Trip with the Teacher is watching it for one thing above all else: skillfully directed trash.It's better than it has any right to be, but that goes without saying that it knows what it is: this is like one of the rare good pieces of movie-lore that inspired Tarantino and Rodriguez with their pictures: it's unrepentant in its conventions and split of black-and-white, and it's played out to its full extent.