Okay, after raving about this trailer a few days ago; I can now say I’m one of the few people on earth who’ve actually seen “An American Hippie in Israel” in its entirety. There was a special screening of it earlier tonight in an unmarked art gallery and for those of us lucky enough to hear about it, entrance was free; as it’s the kind of movie no one would even think of charging admission to.

The copy we were viewing appeared to a DVD transfer from a French VHS; here are my notes:

1) The title “An American Hippie in Israel” seems to have been created for the upcoming Grindhouse Releases repackaging; the original name of the movie is very clearly in English “The Hitch Hiker”. In fact, the film deliberately avoids specifying the locale, substituting “your country” and “you people” for Israel.

2) In a very unintentionally funny seduction scene; the Vietnam vet goes on about how he now travels the world because of the horrors he’s seen in war; only for his Shakespearean monologue to be interrupted around the five minute mark by the impatient lips of his female host. Whether it was lust or she was just trying to shut him up, we’ll never know.

3) Moments later, he picks her up as to “carry her across the threshold” only to move about half an inch and put her down in the exact same spot. It’s like the ADD of sex scenes.

4) After seducing his lady love with his “far out” slang; the American starts what appears to be a Jim Jones like cult in Tel Aviv. Despite wanting to be freed from having to wear clothing; his followers are covered from head to toe in formless white gowns.

5) The killer mimes in the trailer are supposed to represent the mindless machine society is trying to turn the hippie into.

6) While you can’t tell with the lead performance; ALL of the actors are Israelis with the English dubbed in later. I bring this up because as the movie progresses the cast has the habit of repeating the same lines over and over, as though that’s all of the script they can remember. Nope, for some reason the director had the chance to fix that in post and redundancy was actually an artistic decision. Beautiful.

7) Whoever came up with the “showing less is scarier” philosophy of Jaws clearly didn’t see the sharks in this movie.

8) One character’s dialogue is left in Hebrew as to set up the misunderstanding that leads to the film’s tragic ending. Though if you watch the scene carefully; while there’s a language barrier, there’s no actual misunderstanding. Oops.

9) With the four main characters now turning on each other; we cut away from the female leads and when we cut back they’re engaged in a topless catfight. Even if you don’t love this movie; you’ll love this movie.

10) Best I can tell the moral of the story is war is bad because innocent goats get slaughtered. Anyway, I give “An American Hippie in Israel” an 8 out of 10 in the pantheon of bad movies. While there are too many musical montages in places I’d prefer bad plot; the film more than makes up for it by having every single character seem stoned without a single instance of drug use.