GIRLS ON THE ROAD (1972) **

Two goody-two-shoes wallflower high school girls make a pact to finally let down their hair.  After graduation, Debbie (Kathleen Cody) and Karen (Dianne Hull) hop in a sportscar and go up the California coast looking for adventure.  Along the way, they pick up a mentally unstable Nam vet (Slap Shot’s Michael Ontkean) who is prone to violence and give him a lift to a hippie commune up the beach.  Unfortunately, there’s a serial killer prowling the area who just might be looking to make the girls his next victims.  

Girls on the Road kicks off with a fun opening credits sequence where all the titles appear as bumper stickers in a beach parking lot.  (You can also spot Uschi Digard in this sequence.)  Both Hull and Cody make for likeable leads, and their engaging presence is enough to hold your attention, even when the plot dawdles.  Ontkean is quite good as the seemingly mild-mannered soldier who occasionally snaps and beats the crap out of bikers.  It’s just a shame that his constant wavy, color-coated flashbacks get a little intrusive after a while. 

At its heart, Girls on the Road is more innocent than exploitative.  There’s a scene where Hull briefly flashes her boobs to a passing motorist, and that’s about all we get in terms of exploitation content.  (It’s PG after all.)  Like the main characters, it often feels like the film was searching for its identity as it often plays like a buffet of other movies.  You got a road trip movie, a coming-of-age movie, a beach movie, and a hippie movie all fighting for supremacy, and none of them really emerge as the clear victor.  

Most of the time, there’s a reason why most of these kinds of films had a bunch of different elements that didn’t exactly gel.  That was so they could be repackaged and sold under other titles, with advertising that played up whatever genre was hot at the time.  (The fact that it has two alternate titles kind of supports that.)  Of all the various subplots, the hippie commune stuff is probably the hardest chunk to sit through.  

Girls on the Road is watchable for the most part.  It’s kind of lightweight, but enjoyable.  That is, until the completely unsatisfying ending.  I don’t know if they were going for one of those downbeat Easy Rider type of endings, and got cold feet at the last second, or if there was supposed to be an epilogue at the end that never got filmed or what.  Whatever the case, it just doesn’t work at all.  I won’t spoil what happens.  Let’s just say it seems a bit out of left field for what had been up to that point a rather innocuous flick.

AKA:  Hot Summer Week.  AKA:  Macho Trip.