The Trip (1967; Roger Corman)

Would you drop acid with Bruce Dern?

Before Peter Fonda made the trailblazing Easy Rider with his co-star Dennis Hopper, he was already a counterculture icon from The Trip, in the role of Paul Grove, a TV commercial director on the verge of a divorce from Sally (Susan Strasberg) who falls in with some Hollywood hippy-dippy types, and eventually goes on his first cosmic journey of LSD at Bruce Dern’s pad (see above).  The rest of the film is that long day’s journey through a burning brain where reality and illusion jam on a merry-go-round.  It’s Blowup for the Monkees generation, it’s Chappaqua filmed as a cartoon.

Panic in the City (1968; Eddie Davis)

I've long been fascinated with the low-budget genre quickies produced in the late 1960s under the various umbrellas of United Pictures Corporation. These undemanding films (including Destination Inner Space, Cyborg 2087, Dimension 5, and The Destructors) mostly found distribution on television. As late as the 1990s, they were still filler on City TV's "Late Great Movies". (Our most important film education often came from whatever aired at 4:10 AM).