Wild in the Streets

Director Barry Shear's 1968 film—produced by American International Pictures (AIP), which specialized in low-budget horror flicks, beach movies, and teen drive-in fare (many of them Roger Corman films)—stars Christopher Jones as Max Frost, a rock star who leads a youth uprising to drop the voting age to 14 and then gets elected to the Oval Office. What might initially appear to be an empowerment fantasy is actually a sour satire of youth culture gone fascist, more in line with adult fears than teenage fantasies. Once in power, the radical teens dose reservoirs across the nation with LSD and toss everyone over 35 into concentration camps. That's par for the course for AIP, which had a habit of spiking their drive-in youth films with portraits of teen heroes as immature, misguided, self-destructive, and ultimately in need of guidance from the adult generation. Wild in the Streets depicts youth culture as a force of chaos, decadence, and reckless anarchy, but it does have fun with the sheer outrageousness of the premise, which has earned the film cult status. Shelley Winters takes top billing as Max's doting mother, a smothering caricature who rides his coattails to power, oblivious of her own vulnerability as a parental figure in a teenage revolution, and Richard Pryor makes his screen debut as Stanley X, resident revolutionary anthropologist and the drummer in Max's band. The film's signature song "Shape of Things to Come" remains one of the anthems of the ‘60s. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)