Well, if this movie couldn't kill Zalman King's career, nothing could, and so he went on to distinguish himself as a "Cinemax late night" level soft-core porn impresario.
Zalman's later stuff had better production values and writing, or at least a bigger budgets and just plain LOOKED better than this poverty row production. "TWT" looks as if it was shot entirely on location with someone's hand held 16MM camera for strictly pennies. King is the only real reason to watch "Trip With Teacher", as well as the only real actor in it, and he alternates between chewing the scenery and sliming around like the biggest scuzball in the history of drive-in cinema. He's pro enough to mostly pull it off, but it makes for a basically indigestible wad of sleazy psycho cinema.
The screenplay caters to the audience's most basic and deplorable instincts while still managing to be talky and static and boring.One woman is raped, one girl is murdered after a lengthy chase, and a couple of males who get in Zalman's way also bite the dust, but none of it is staged convincingly, so you might as well be watching Skinemax.
The four young women who are the meat of the film's exploitation theme can't act for beans - not their fault, of course, since they're in the movie to be pretty and vulnerable and victimized. But that means because it's typical of the film's direction to have the camera zoom in each of the actresses' face in turn for lengthy close ups, none of them can do anything interesting or involving with their big "moments", and consequently all the audience gets is a lot of dead air.
One extra star for a pretty good motorcycle chase and one genuinely surprising moment when (SPOILER ALERT) the young "good guy" motorcyclist who we thought was killed at the end of the motorcycle chase drops a noose over the head of Zalman's henchman.
Zalman's later stuff had better production values and writing, or at least a bigger budgets and just plain LOOKED better than this poverty row production. "TWT" looks as if it was shot entirely on location with someone's hand held 16MM camera for strictly pennies. King is the only real reason to watch "Trip With Teacher", as well as the only real actor in it, and he alternates between chewing the scenery and sliming around like the biggest scuzball in the history of drive-in cinema. He's pro enough to mostly pull it off, but it makes for a basically indigestible wad of sleazy psycho cinema.
The screenplay caters to the audience's most basic and deplorable instincts while still managing to be talky and static and boring.One woman is raped, one girl is murdered after a lengthy chase, and a couple of males who get in Zalman's way also bite the dust, but none of it is staged convincingly, so you might as well be watching Skinemax.
The four young women who are the meat of the film's exploitation theme can't act for beans - not their fault, of course, since they're in the movie to be pretty and vulnerable and victimized. But that means because it's typical of the film's direction to have the camera zoom in each of the actresses' face in turn for lengthy close ups, none of them can do anything interesting or involving with their big "moments", and consequently all the audience gets is a lot of dead air.
One extra star for a pretty good motorcycle chase and one genuinely surprising moment when (SPOILER ALERT) the young "good guy" motorcyclist who we thought was killed at the end of the motorcycle chase drops a noose over the head of Zalman's henchman.