Whoaaaa far out man!  Okay, let’s get the story straight here – Drunk in a Graveyard is happily a British Columbia based blog, and for those who don’t know much about British Columbia, we are Canada’s capital for two things – filthy hippies, and marijuana.  We smoke ’em big peace pipe up here in BC, and our dope is world renowned.  Because of this, this has led to a burgeoning empire of unwashed masses congregating to celebrate solstices, grow organic food, take yoga classes, grow their hair into dreadlocks, and drive horribly gas inefficient but still cool looking souped up VW Vans to summer festivals.

One of these such summer festivals is the Shambhala Music Festival, held in the quite little town of Salmo, BC, and is something like BC’s equivalent to the eponymous Burning Man festival.  15,000 filthy, crazy, unwashed lunatics all gather to wander around nude, dance until dawn and take enough drugs combined to kill a whole Zoo of animals.  As a long time festival attendee I have gained a certain appreciation for the finer things in life, a taste for the small pleasures if you will – overflowing horns of mead, big ass joints, people wearing all sorts of goofy shit, naked titties, loud cacophonic music echoing over the hills, and all other forms of revelry.  I enjoy and find both cheer and a certain campiness in chilled out folks who want to dance and spread some free love..  it really is a good experience – A Mecca, a sort of Disneyland for crazy adults if you will….

……But I’ve never thought I was changing the world while I was half naked, drunk, wearing a tutu and glitter shaking my ass in the summer twilight..  Nope.  Never once thought i was part of a movement or was doing anything other than the basest form of self indulgence for indulgence’s sake.  I am a godless heathen, prone to fits of Bacchanalian excess much like the rest of us and I have accepted this and we are moving on.

What really actually is grinding my gears these days is not hippies themselves, or a drug taking lifestyle but rather these really really pompous new age hippie-types who quite literally act like their shit doesn’t stink because they once took some LSD, saw some shit and now have an appreciation for dubstep.  These are the same people who will bray incessantly about being part of a “movement”, “Occupy”, and Monsanto GMO foods all while eating from a tray of mac and cheese while their eyes dance wildly within their skulls.  These are the same people who will rant about saving the rain forest, saving the environment, and world peace but will smoke a pack day, drink like a fish and have more capsules in their pill cases than my Grandma’s morning stash.

While I can usually ignore or refuse to take part in many of these discussions with said new age hippie types, I recently have had several run ins with some of these cum stains on society’s drawers..  the first of which involved a hippie girl telling me to “stop messing around with the spirits” when shown my Ouija board collection.  This very same girl had also just finished cutting up a big ass line of some mystery powder and was advising me to not incur the spiritual wrath of “demons”…

You might be laughing, but inside I am dying, and let me tell you why folks..  Stupid ignorant people are basically my kryptonite.  I am the Clark Kent of banal idiocy except I would look way hotter in a cape.  Suffice to say that when I also had to explain how the Bible was made up to another MDMA lab rat, I almost lost my credulence.  See you have these new age types so concerned with health food (but not so concerned with hygiene or the insane amount of drugs and alcohol they consume), saving the environment (but they own Apple products, drive inefficient vans, and regularly attend events powered by generators), and brotherhood (but lord heaven help you if you show up at a hippie party and don’t look the part because brotherhood stops as soon as you don’t have a set of dreadlocks or are dressed like you stepped out of a steampunk novel).  Someone should really just remake Mean Girls except put the whole cast in Steampunk clothes and give everyone dreadlocks.  It’s entirely applicable.

..Sooo..  this led to me recently pondering how awesome it would be for someone to make a movie about a serial killer who kills only hippies, and what fun might ensue…  I debated purchasing a handy cam and filming my own movie and then I realized..  someone has already made this movie and fulfilled my dreams, beaten me to the punch, and so on..

This Guy:

And the movie I have up on the chopping block this week is:

..  I watched this movie years ago but thought little of it until now..  When I needed it the most.  It’s like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter…  it came to me at just the right time!  Anyways who remembers David Arquette?  He played Dewey the cop in Wes Craven’s Scream series:

The set of Scream is also where David Arquette met his wife Courtney Cox.  I’m only saying this because she was one of the producers of The Tripper, which basically boils down to him going “Hey honey?  Can you lend me some money to make a movie?” and her being all, ‘How about you clean the garage and then yeah I guess..”, and that is how the Tripper was born.  Oh also – Wes Craven directed Scream, right?  Well he also appears as a filthy hippie wearing a top-hat in a cameo role in the Tripper.

So the plot of The Tripper is basically this – a dude in a Ronald Reagan mask runs around a hippie free love festival and murders hippies..  seems pretty legit right?  And also horrifying.  I mean think about how off your game you’d be if someone came crashing through a kegger wielding a chainsaw..  you’d probably just fecalate in your pants or choke on your beer bong.  I know I would.  I’m a mess when I’m intoxicated, and generally completely unable to order a pizza let alone deal with a psychotic mad man.

As I was doing some reading into how it was The Tripper came to be and read that David Arquette was at a reggae party one time and he was super stoned I guess and had this sick vision in his head of a slasher coming out and killing all the hippies, which basically makes him my Spirit Animal because I think about shit like this all the time and not just about hippies either.  Someone will be beaking off to me about how their baby took a shit, or that they just had their nails done or that their son is home from college and I will just be humming away in my mind thinking about random acts of violence.

So as a gift to you born out of these thoughts of violence, I bequeath to my Drunk in a Graveyard readers my review..  of the Tripper.  In the spirit of British Columbia, we lit up a big joint and downed some gin before commencement.

The movie opens with the quote from Ronald Reagan that says “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah”.

And then it goes to some psychedelic colors and is all bad acid trip there for a bit.  And for any of my readers who have never partaken in LSD, it is exactly what the movies and television show, at least in my experience.  So the movie starts in 1967 and on the TV is a lot of a footage of the Vietnam War and watching it and potentially masturbating is this creepy little kid.  His Dad is over in the next room tending to his dying/rotting mother, who is randomly covered in bruises and appears to be quite ill I guess?  Anyways the Dad gets a call that some hippie protestors are preventing his company from completing some logging so he grabs his creepy little kid and heads out to kick some ass and take some names.

Dad rolls up to the scene and finds a group of protestors dancing and singing around a Red Wood tree, and his crew is unable to complete their logging job.  Dad calmly tries to explain that he’s just doing his job and needs money to pay for his wife’s medical expenses and tries to reason with the hippies (which is a rookie move because you can only reason with people who inhabit reality..  it’s proven fact).  Anyways the bald headed hippie dick in a Sherpa coat basically says that if that dude’s wife needs to die to save some trees then so be it and they get into a shoving match and then somehow the Dad gets arrested by the police, and his son doing what any reasonable boy would do when faced with his father being arrested for beating hippies..  GOES COMPLETELY CRAZY AND PICKS UP A CHAINSAW after having some weird PTSD Vietnam flashback…

and then proceeds to chainsaw the Sherpa coat wearing hippie dickhole in the neck…

..Then the little boy gets arrested too and I guess the whole family just goes to shit, and who fucking knows what happens to the half dead mother because it just sort of fades out, and then reopens with a group of sexy drug taking hippies in a van driven by Jason Mewes.

Allow me to also say that as Jason Mewes is piloting this hippie wagon he is also sucking directly from a can of whipped cream, and for those playing the home game, he is huffing nitrous oxide..  laughing gas.

And again for those not in the know – you DEFINITELY don’t want to be huffing nitrous while piloting a motor coach.  Nitrous is a fun experience in that it only lasts for about a minute or so and everything goes completely digital, it makes your voice real deep and generally results in everyone laughing maniacally for about 45 seconds.  Whenever I think of the phrase “hooped up on goofballs” i immediately think of nitrous.  Anyways Jason and his crew are heading off the Free Love Festival to spend a weekend doing drugs, listening to jam bands and generally being sexy.  Please also note that the Free Love Festival is being held in the same place that the little kid butchered that weird hippie and the town is not at all impressed.

As the free loving hippies make a pit stop at the side of the road some rednecks drive by and pelt them with beer bottles and actually bean this one guy who looks like a hipster version of Rambo in the head.  Rather than take their friend to a hospital and have his sewn up they pour some booze on his head and straight up stitch up his gaping head wound, because taking drugs is obviously more important than the health and well being of your supposed buddy.  The kids then stop at a gas station for some supplies (read alcohol) and run into the very same rednecks and the one chick who has decided to stay sober at this Free Love event (go with me on it) goes totally crazy and starts beating the shit out of the rednecks because hippie bitches equal hard as fuck.

Oh and one of the rednecks is David Arquette.

Anyways we find out that the one girl is all freaking out and beating people senseless because the first time she took LSD her crazy ex boyfriend showed up and went all Single White Female on her ass and she had a bad trip and started seeing zombies??  Remind me to never take the brown acid.  Jesus Christ.

Anyways it turns out that the festival is being put on by some low-life (Surprise!) and that he has had people die after several of his festivals and I guess the town’s cops are pretty leery about the whole event.

Also of note here is that this creepy festival organizer/promoter with his raper van is played by Paul Rubens..  aka Pee-Wee Herman.

Who remembers Pee-Wee Herman?  And more importantly do you remember him for the Pee-Wee Herman show or do you remember him for fiddling with his flesh flute in a dirty movie theatre?  Because I’m pretty sure it’s the latter and not the former, which is greasy as fuck.  I mean yeah dude we all masturbate, that’s totally fine, but at least do it some place with a little bit of privacy like a KFC bathroom or a church confessional…  I mean come on man, stay classy.

Anyways, the town cops sort of make it seem like its this big deal that people have died at his events, and that makes no sense to me…  you get a big mass of people together, all drunk and high and doing the weirdest shit, of course weird shit is going to take place!  A couple years back at the Electric Daisy festival in Vegas some chick went haywire on drugs and leapt out a window and died, at that big festival in Germany there was a stampede and some people got trampled, and here in BC even, someone was ripped apart when a drug deal went sideways.  Weird drugs + weird people = weird situations, so I’m not too sure why the local cops are all bent out of shape about it.  Revelations, I tell you, revelations!

Anyways the cops are all, well there better not be any monkeyshines out of you Mister and he’s all yeah okay and then the kids show up at the festival and are all acting hard to the cops, and the one is all, don’t make me search your van and they kind of fuck off.

The local cops are pretty much out of their element as the filthy hippies start trickling in:

Meanwhile the hippie kids (who look more like ironic hipsters than hippies) have set up their camp and are cutting out rails, and sitting around a campfire.  The one girl says “I don’t know what I would have done without my cocaine!” and then Jason Mewes quips “I dunno, speed?  Anything to keep from eating?”  And someone else chimes in, “Yeah she’s on the cokehead diet!”

Anyways the one chick who had the zombie LSD freakout is all pissed off at her boyfriend because he wants to take a bunch of drugs and get high and they’re kind of all fighting and grumpy and he’s like..  pussy or drugs?  pussy?  drugs?  And it kind of goes on like that for a while.  Pretty much the question on every dude’s mind if you ask me.  Actually it’s been the question on my mind numerous times..

Jason Mewes busts out this whole sheet of LSD, of what appears to be 100 hits or so and the group is debating if thats enough for them because they are “professional drug takers”.  Allow me to just say that unless you’re partying with Hunter S. Thompson, 100 hits between 6 people is more than enough.  Remember my last post about Necropolis?  What did we learn about eyeshadow and also cocaine?  A LITTLE DAB WILL DO YA, FOLKS.  The same generally applies to LSD.  I have this problem of deep impatience when I have taken LSD in the past and I always think it’s not going to work so then I take more and I end up having a religious experience in a Tim Horton’s parking lot that may or may not have involved the drop kicking of a perfectly good Vanilla Iced Capp.

Anywho, cut back to the cops and they’re really still freaking out about what might potentially go wrong at the festival (A LOT), and the mayor who is being paid off by the skeezy festival guy basically tells the cops to just deal with it and look the other way.  At one point one of the cops is talking about people bringing mobile meth labs to the festival and blowing themselves up, which is just ridiculous…  the idea is that you have meth BEFORE you get there, not be cooking it up like an order of spicy fries for fuck’s sake. Heisenberg isn’t at this festival!

Anyways the naked hippie dude I posted a picture of wanders off into the forest when his woman goes for a weed nap..  He is still naked and following a supposedly wild but obviously pet rabbit (which is also white let me add..  ugh..), and he gets caught in a snare and is then quickly dispatched by our masked killer.

Cut to our wild and crazy kids again and they’re all roaming around high on drugs in the forest and they run in to a really old hippie guy who they call “Old Dude-eronomy” which was pretty hilarious and I guess he warns them about the dangers that lie within the forest and about the murders that had previously happened there.  I’m pretty sure they basically told him he was full of shit and continue off to go partying which is probably a decision I would make, and I guess would probably end up dead or crazy in a horror movie situation…

When naked Eve wakes up from her weed nap to find her Naked boyfriend still missing she reports this to the police who basically tell her to shove it and that he’s probably off taking part in some “big bushed love in”, and they don’t think much more of it until they find the body strung up upside down.  I will point out that if you look closely when they lower the “body” you can see that the blood is running the wrong way, as in it’s running down the sides towards the back as if the body was laying down and not strung up from a tree like it was.  I’m picky with my gore effects, but most of you were probably too stoned to notice.  😉

Back to our kids, they’ve really kicked it up a notch, the music has started and they are handed a balloon of laughing gas and soon they’re dancing with all the other kooks, having a general good time, except for the Acid-Zombie girl who keeps thinking she sees her stalker boyfriend everywhere and is generally being a total buzzkill.

Eventually the newbie guy ends up taking half a capsule of MDMA and proceeds to get fucked right up and staggers around for a while looking wild eyed.

The Free Love “festival” actually looks like some sort of country fair held at a Summer Camp and just appears to be badly organized but that doesn’t really stop anyone.  I mean really a party is what you make of it so next time you’re at church, a funeral, a wake, a baptismal, a bat mitzvah or an Elementary School Christmas pageant just take a couple hits of LSD or go bump some rails in the bathroom and trust me it’ll be way more..  awesomer..  And if not awesomer potentially soul destroying but if you don’t delve into a deep psychosis brought on by a ten year old screeching “O Come All Ye Faithful” while you fry on a couple hits of LSD, you’ll at least be able to have a pretty awesome story you could tell people as a way to gauge if they’re on the level just by their reactions..  I mean I’ve told some fucked up stories in my day and all of my best friends were the ones who were able to trump mine with something even worse..  because then you basically know that that person is solid as fuck because no matter what kind of crazy peanut butter on the cat shenanigans you get into they’re gonna be there for you, and in the case of my friends probably helping.  Anyways the rednecks show up, pelt some hippies with paintballs and then a bunch of people run around for a bit and then go attend the start of a rock concert while the masked serial killer dispatches Old Duderonomy (sad for him) and later hangs his dripping corpse over the crowded rock concert and everyone pretty much goes a bit bananas and then run around some more.

At this point I was pretty drunk and also the movie just sort of started centering around the paranoid weird girl trying to avoid all the drugged out hippies, while being insanely suspicious her old boyfriend was stalking her at the show (which he was) and her just wandering around all cagey for a while.

The cops figure that the old Father from the start of the movie, had something to do with the murders, seeing as how he hates hippies and is basically having a shit about the Free Love Festival being held in the town, so they go rattle his chain a bit and he’s ranting about “commie pinkos” and they basically tell him to behave himself and go off all the while looking at him all suspicious like, you know since his son went apeshit and chainsawed some hippie and what not.  I guess the story is that the son is in a mental institution?  Anyways the cops eventually find out, only after going away that due to Reagan budget cuts the insane asylum was closed and the crazy lunatic kid, now a crazy lunatic man went back to live with his father and took up wearing a Reagan mask and fiddling with his flesh flute in the basement while likely watching footage of the Vietnam War..  who knows?

Anyways back at the festival it turns out the Reagan killer has struck again and cut up some copulating teenagers and the paranoid girl finds them and goes a little crazy and then she’s all running back in the darkness to the filthy dancing hippies and someone sprays her with a water gun full of LSD and she’s all “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” and then the Reagan killer picks that moment to just straight up start hacking random people up en masse pretty well and she basically starts losing her goddamn mind which is pretty lame for her being that she has this affinity towards the bad scary side of LSD and not the look at your hands and laughing until you cry kind.

Ugh so at some point during all this her weird ass stalker boyfriend just pops in with a gun and starts waving it around acting all crazy, being like “why don’t you love me” and accusing her of being high, which clearly she was, but I mean that’s some psycho ass behaviour right there to follow you around all harshing your buzz.  I would be all yes I am high and it’s because the only reality I can tolerate you in is a severely altered one, so fuck off I want to talk to my bunny slippers in peace.  I mean or I would just scream in his face a bit and make him think I was crazier than he was, and just be all horrifying you know..  shit yourself, throw it, speak in Tongues, self-flagellate..  LSD is a funny drug that way, you never know quite what you might endeavour to do.

Anyways due to the fact that her friends are all dead and hacked to pieces (including Jason Mewes!), she finally gets the balls to stand up to this dude and then Ronald Reagan kills him which is really just hilarious and then I guess she freaks out and kills the shit out of Ronald Reagan, again because hippie girls are hard as fuck.

Okay so I will admit I was more checked out than usual for this one, I meant with obvious reasons..  most of them coming back to Monkey See Monkey Do, and may or may not also involve rubber arms and said rubber arms being twisted.  I will however say that the beginning of The Tripper and the end are pretty legit and actually pretty decent if you consider all the camp and shitty humor, but the middle is just this 40 minute slog through basically fuck all where stuff happens for no reasons and there’s lots of shots of people wearing goofy shit just running around/milling around.  Also when they do finally get to the big reveal it’s just sort of a broke ass wank job that literally everyone saw coming and doesn’t make much of a difference anyways.

So in all, if you like drug humor, Jason Mewes, making fun of hippies, making fun of David Arquette, or in general just want a stupid movie to put on for some cheap laughs after a night out, then this is probably your monster.  Don’t be surprised if you BURN OUT part way through.  AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!  Oh and yes I absolutely went there.

Drunk in a Graveyard intoxication rating – 2-3 Drink Minimum

Thanks for joining me for this rantier than usual edition of Drunk in Graveyard, and until next time my filthy hippie darklings – don’t take the brown acid, never trust a hippie and stay spooky!