In the last week of summer before starting college best buds Gene (Bo White) and Tracy (Darcey Hollingsworth) take to the road in their decked out bus to enjoy some freedom. Their aim is to hook up with as many girls as possible as they live the life of the open road. Blue Summer (1973) is part Easy Rider (1969) and part coming of age story but all soft-core erotica. The boys get into some low stakes scrapes, enjoy a prolonged sex scene, then start all over again.
Blue Summer was written and directed by sexploitation and pornography auteur Chuck Vincent. Vincent’s focus is, as always, on the scenes of beautiful women and strapping young men entangled in carnal lust. However, peppered throughout the film is some mild topical satire. A hippie guru and his two lady followers are depicted as grifters, prostitutes, and pimp while a pair of hitchhiking women are depicted as compulsive thieves. The naive Gene and Tracy learn some hard lessons with Vincent glorifying their carnal pursuits. The satirical elements in Blue Summer don’t amount to anything really other than a few cheap laughs that, from today’s perspective, fail to land.
The social economy of the film is such that every woman is depicted as a whore until the very end of the film. In their last sexual encounters Gene and Tracy find themselves used as sexual objects by women in an inversion of this economy. The whole film builds to this moment where the two young men realize that they have an emotional stake in these encounters. This isn’t anything profound but it does work to close out the rather repetitive narrative nicely.
One of the more interesting features of Blue Summer is its soundtrack, specifically the songs by Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is an obscure 10cc-esque rock group who put out a self-titled album in 1972. Their songs accompany the opening and closing credits as well as the numerous sex scenes. These songs are meant to reiterate the intended sentimentality that comes with the anxious exchanges between Gene and Tracy in anticipation of college life. Although those scenes never ring true the candy-like confection of Sleepy Hollow’s music succeeds. These songs also help legitimize the film at a time when soundtracks by pop groups were all the rage.
Insofar as drive-in sexploitation features are concerned Blue Summer is run of the mill. There’s too little plot for the film to have any momentum and too little characterization for it to work as a “hangout” movie. Blue Summer promises copious amounts of simulated sex and that is what it delivers. Everything else is simply dressing.
