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subject of the movie


"Hooper's first feature was 1970's neverseen Eggshells, a vehicle starring local UT residents and ostensibly a tale of Vietnam vets coming home."

found on http://www.terrortrap.com/directors/hooper.htm

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also found this (a lot more of information) on http://www.joebobbriggs.com:

Psychedelic hippie cinema-verite experiment in technique notable for being the first film of Tobe Hooper, who would make THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE two years later. Filmed with a hand-held camera in a communal house on F Street in Austin, it's mostly unconnected scenes in which the counter-culture denizens of the house smoke dope, have sex and discuss feminism and Vietnam. The standout performer is a lanky guy with a handlebar mustache and John Lennon glasses billed as "Boris Schnurr"--actually Kim Henkel, who would go on to write "Chain Saw" as well as "Last Night at the Alamo." In this film he's a dope-smoking sexaholic poet who recites rambling beat poetry while rapping on a typewriter in the toilet. He has a full-frontal nude sequence in which he burns his car and his clothes and frolics through a meadow. Meanwhile, a "hyperelectric cryptoembryonic presence" dwells in the basement of the house, and it's activated whenever the residents put their heads under an antique beauty-salon hair dryer--an excuse for spinning, pulsating images and fast-motion film, what passed for psychedelic effects at the time. The film played college campuses only. Eight breasts. Exploding paper airplane. Swordfight. Encounter group Fu. Lots of fiddles and kazoos on the soundtrack. Hippie wedding al fresco ("Let the winds of the heavens dance between you"). Self-painting walls. Kaleidoscopic aardvarking. Exploding Lovemobile, with fireball. Best hippie line: "I love you for your breasts." With Mahlon Foreman, Ron Barnhart, Amy Lester, Pamela Craig, Jim Schulman, Allen Danziger, Sharon Danziger, David Noll. With poetry by Henkel.

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this movie sounds fuucking badass. I would love to see this.

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Saw it just today!! Never heard of it til I heard of a screening about a year ago...

it's an interesting film. Very well edited, with the trademark almost jumpcut style thats in TCM. VERY hippy dippy and talky, but the cool moments are really cool... Anything to do with that orb in the basement basically.

The scenes in the basement are reminescent of "Poltergeist" with its strong backlight and crazy, ominous supernatural light. Other visual cues to Hoopers later work are present, but those are the big ones.

The stand out actor for me was Alan "You believe what your old lady is hawkin' me?" Danzger. Might just be because I know him so well from TCM though...

OH...and the creepy kid who first discovers the orb is a stand out as wll, with the scene where he follows the hippy girl in the park through the balloons being a real standout.

All in all, more of a curiosity for Hooper fans rather than something you would watch again and again, but a real showcase of talent for a then very young and currrently underrated filmmaker.

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