Two Californian hippie chicks, Carol (Jill Senter) and Maureen (Gina Eastwood), are hitchhiking their way through Florida and as they sit in a field contemplating their next move, they notice a motor home has pulled up by the roadside for the driver, a young man called Chuck (Alan Long), to get out and relieve himself. Carol sees this as an opportunity, but the more cosmic Maureen needs more persuasion, as she makes sure to mention that Chuck is obviously an Ares and Ares is going through a turbulent time, astrologically speaking. Nevertheless, she boards the vehicle with Carol and they embark on a journey into the swamplands - or do they?
When discussing the great head trip movies of the sixties and seventies, filmmaker Bernard Hirschenson's Pick-Up (not to be confused with the Hugo Haas effort Pickup) is not often mentioned, which is curious as it has all the right elements in place. Scripted by John Winter, it marked the only significant feature for many of the participants, with the cast especially appearing hardly anywhere else, and for Hirschenson, who was more used to creating instructional films and commercials, it represented his only entry as director of big screen entertainment.
He wasn't only the director on this, as he also acted as producer, cameraman and editor into the bargain, and it's true that there does seem to be a particular sensibility at work here even if he didn't pen the script. That method seems indebted to the advertisements he made, as a lot of the shots of the girls gambolling in the fields resemble your typical seventies shampoo commercial in style. However, what is being sold here is far more obscure, it's more of a mood, a stance, a look askance at the world. If I tell you there's an of-its-time ambiguous ending, then you'll see where they were coming from.
Once in the motor home, Maureen settles down with her tarot deck to see what lies in the cards while Carol smokes pot up front next to Chuck, and bops around to the delight of a truckful of young yahoos who whoop and holler when it looks as if Carol might flash them. But a series of detours lands the trio stuck in the middle of nowhere, and with only Chuck's boss continually calling them on the carphone, they are as good as stranded unless some helpful soul can track them down. So the question arises: what to do now you're lost and awaiting assistance that might not arrive for hours?
Well, the answer to that is, naturally, sexual intercourse as Pick-Up goes all softcore on us. For Carol, this is an opportunity to engage in amorous behaviour with Chuck amongst the sunlit scenery, but for the more introspective Maureen it's a chance to face up to the demons of her past, and she has visions of the time she was seduced by a creepy priest as a teenager; we also get to see Carol's formative sexual experience which was much more wholesome, although to make the actresses look younger they both have their hair in pigtails, which surely fools nobody but the most naive viewer as they look just the same otherwise. Throw in Maureen offering herself to the God Apollo, buttonholed by a passing politician and being scared by a clown, and you have a pleasing slice of seventies trippiness that doesn't seem sure if it's meant to be nightmarish or not. What does it all mean? Whatever you want it to, man... Music by Patrick Adams and Michael Rod.
