Why am I reviewing this? It's not typical of what I normally review , although that doesn't mean anything in particular because I don't review 99 percent of the movies that I see. I had never heard of this movie before but I was bored the other day and it happened to show up on cable on a channel with no commercials - and I'll watch just about anything that is sans commercials. Plus I'm a sucker for a road trip flick and I will take any chance that I can get to take a sixties road trip, even if it is with a bunch of nuns on a bus instead of freaks on motorcycles.
First of all, while fairly well made, this is not a great movie. It's mainly the story and plot, or rather the lack of them, that causes the problems here. Technically it looks fine and the shot on location photography is very nice. But the story is so incredibly thin and silly and riddled with the most over-the-top clichés and contrived plot devices that it becomes distracting. The entire film is nothing more than a series of connected scenes of the type that junior high drama students might come up with. The only progression in the film is the physical one of the bus travelling forward in time and space, because otherwise the scenes could be mixed and shuffled like cards and placed in any order and the end result would be about the same. This film has got to be one of the very last examples of well made but quickly written hack jobs written by old school Hollywood hack writers - except for a few of the "modern woman" touches gleaned from the swinging sixties optimism pre-Altamont this film could easily have been made in 1958 instead of 1968.
Just a few examples of the above can be illustrated by the church's school bus. The basic "plot" of this film is that a group of girls from a Catholic school and their Mother Nuns take a road trip to California for a rally. That's pretty much it. They have an old broken down school bus, which in one of a seemingly endless line of contrivances (you'll have to watch to see what this particular contrivance is) gets replaced by a brand new one for the trip. A nice shiny yellow brand new bus with the school's name on it. Early on in the trip, the driving nun stalls the bus on some railroad tracks with a train coming (of course). The brand new bus won't start. They start to evacuate the bus and the door won't open. It's one of those bus doors with the handle that the driver pulls - when have you ever seen one get stuck, especially on a brand new bus? So they go to evacuate out of the back emergency door. That one is stuck too. What the heck is happening with this bus all of the sudden? A brand new, perfectly functioning bus turns into s teenage virgin and nun deathtrap all of the sudden. So the girls start clambering out of the windows - I was only surprised that all of the windows weren't stuck too. Well, of course they all got out and the nun was able to restart the bus just in the nick of time. And the scene just ends with a circle fadeout and that's that. No mention of how they were all able to reboard the bus with the stuck doors and all.
Further on down the line the bus suffers a blowout on on of the brand new tires, runs out of gas (not the bus's fault there, but leads to a great scene with ridiculous biker "toughs" roughing up nuns), gets filled with water and suds in a truck wash, and breaks an axle while evading a charge of Indians on the warpath (yes, you read that right). I think that they would have been better off with the old bus!
I'm sorry though, I must apologize. It's easy to find fault with the writing here, as it is atrocious. But at the end of the day I enjoyed this film. It's a period piece to be sure - in the extreme. Movies like this will NEVER be made again. It echoes a sentiment that was naive even in 1968. It was past its time before it was even made. But it is entertaining, and even if you do pick it apart by the clichés and contrivances, well that can add to the fun. The cinematography is pleasing and the scenery of late 1960's midwest is pleasing too. You are not going to watch this film and then get depressed, and there is something to be said for that.
So go ahead and watch this movie, and take a road trip yourself back to a more innocent age. Relax and enjoy it - there is also much to be said for taking a detour to a couple of hours away from the stressful mood of the planet Earth in the year 2006. And as hackneyed as they can be, I'd still prefer one movie like this to one hundred of the market analyzed, test audienced, product placed and merchandise marketed complete and total cr@p ones that ooze from Hollywood's rear end these days.
