LSD

I guess each person taking LSD has their own individual experience and therefore, whilst one person's experience may closely resemble some of the imagery in 200 motels, another's experience may be totally different. I used to regularly take acid with a bunch of friends and although we had many adventures together, we all had different trips. I saw 200 motels around that time and was dismayed at just how wrong it was, but, on reflection, I guess they we're possibly trying to represent their experiences using the technology available. My lasting memory of it was some fat bloke with long curly hair being very annoying. If one of my friends was as annoying as him, I wouldn't be taking acid anywhere near him as he'd freak me out.
In terms of film's representation of drug induced hallucinations in general, many are way off the mark in my experience. When I took acid or mushrooms, I very rarely had huge, bizarre hallucinations of things that just weren't there. It was more visual ditortions in peripheral vision and an altered train of thought. However, eating large amounts of very strong cannabis in combination with LSD always seemed to put me in a right state, where I found it hard to distinguish the point at which I'd fallen asleep as reality was running off in the opposite direction pretty quickly. Funny old time.

When I first saw this movie very late at night on television,
it made my brain react in such a way that I had to think to myself
for a moment... had I taken anything hallucinogenic that day?
The answer was no, but this film really warps your senses with
mad twisting visuals, complex music, bizare plot subplot microplot
stream of conciousness, and the over-all feeling of the cheapness
and "home made" feel of the movie.
Crazy, cheap, disorienting, a lot like life on the road.
I remember the shock (definately Zappa's aim) of seeing
Ringo Starr decend from the ceiling and talk about *beep*
a nun playing a harp (Keith Moon!).
It is, I think, a close representation of taking LSD, not just the
visuals but the confusion and mixing of ideas, as well as the ideas themselves.
Dated, cheap, sometimes a bit overly pretentious, still it's a fun
trip.
The more you watch it, the more you'll appreciate it (like most things).

[deleted]

I have a hard time judging because the first time that I saw this was when I was tripping balls. It was at a friends house and their parents had a really great (for the time) entertainment center. It was one of those big projection screens, so everyone was smashed together, or on the floor in front of the couch smashed together. For a man who railed against drugs.... this move was a heads delights.


man-o-man when the trumpets all went up and down together and in their shape was static-noise.....

yeah this reminded me of a very strange Acid trip I once had

When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...

It didn't much remind me of LSD at all except for the feeling of confusion and near insanity it can instill... I still think this was the point of the movie; just a bunch of wigging out. Frank wanted to document the insanity around him because, let's face it, for a drug-free guy, it must have been weird hanging out with these freaks. I used to do plenty of acid and thinking back on it now, we were really all pretty insane even though it didn't seem like it at the time. We were very aware, however, that normal people would think we were nuts, which is why we often found ourselves incapacitated in public doing the simplest things, like buying a can of coca cola or simply walking down the sidewalk in broad daylight while tripping.

One time, a friend and I found ourselves with our backs flat to the side of a building, laughing hysterically, so that the people inside the store couldn't see us... and yet everyone on the sidewalk walking past us and in the busy street in front of us, could VERY MUCH see us, yet we weren't concerned about that for some reason. We were terrified and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of not wanting to be seen by the people in the store because we thought they would "know something was wrong with us," but meanwhile there were A LOT more people ALL AROUND US who must have known something was VERY wrong with us.

Anyway, I thought the movie had some EXTREMELY visually trippy effects in it, especially the black and white line effect when they drive up to the town and start bugging out. I forget whether they were really supposed to be tripping or what, but the effect of the lines, while not something I ever saw on acid, certainly looked visually confusing enough to look like an authentic acid hallucination. Perhaps if I found myself in a black and white striped room somewhere, I would have seen such things.

It didn't much remind me of LSD at all except for the feeling of confusion and near insanity it can instill... I still think this was the point of the movie; just a bunch of wigging out. Frank wanted to document the insanity around him because, let's face it, for a drug-free guy, it must have been weird hanging out with these freaks. I used to do plenty of acid and thinking back on it now, we were really all pretty insane even though it didn't seem like it at the time. We were very aware, however, that normal people would think we were nuts, which is why we often found ourselves incapacitated in public doing the simplest things, like buying a can of coca cola or simply walking down the sidewalk in broad daylight while tripping.

One time, a friend and I found ourselves with our backs flat to the side of a building, laughing hysterically, so that the people inside the store couldn't see us... and yet everyone on the sidewalk walking past us and in the busy street in front of us, could VERY MUCH see us, yet we weren't concerned about that for some reason. We were terrified and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of not wanting to be seen by the people in the store because we thought they would "know something was wrong with us," but meanwhile there were A LOT more people ALL AROUND US who must have known something was VERY wrong with us.

Anyway, I thought the movie had some EXTREMELY visually trippy effects in it, especially the black and white line effect when they drive up to the town and start bugging out. I forget whether they were really supposed to be tripping or what, but the effect of the lines, while not something I ever saw on acid, certainly looked visually confusing enough to look like an authentic acid hallucination. Perhaps if I found myself in a black and white striped room somewhere, I would have seen such things.

I watched this while tripping the oher day. I think it is almost the perfect movie to watch tripping. There is no film that looks like a trip, even enter the void with it's CGI failed at that. But this movie just screams LSD trip to me. So yes i would agree this is one the best visual representations of a trip ever put on film.