The very title of Scott Slone’s Astral Plane Drifter promises a strange merger of an oater like Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) and something altogether more psychonautic – perhaps a heady hybrid akin to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘spaghetti easterns’ El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The film’s opening line – “We all enclose ourselves in boxes” – seems to confirm this metaphysical bent, although the addition of the vocative “man” to the sentence’s end also suggests something closer to a stoner comedy. In fact the film combines all these elements into a funny-weird wilderness quest.
The speaker (in voiceover) of that opening line is the titular Drifter (played by the film’s writer and creator Mike Caravella), who goes on, “Mine just happens to be a bit more boxier than others – but that is just my physical realm. My true existence is in the ethereal realm.” The Drifter fancies himself an interdimensional traveler and serial saviour of the universe – or at least of his ex-girlfriend (Irena Murphy). With a certain faux modesty, he says of himself, “I guess you can say that I am the holy grail of metaphysical life energy,” and also refers to himself as “a fully realised Mystic of the First Order” (or, heheh, “MOFO”) – but the truth is that, with his endless ingestion of drugs and alcohol, and his enslavement to bodily functions, he is less the Shamanic superhero that he imagines himself to be, and more like the long-haired, moustachioed, ever high Cheech Marin of Up In Smoke (1978), Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (1980) and Nice Dreams (1981) fame. He even has a Chong-ish Sidekick (Andrew Joseph Perez) to complete the picture.
Much of the humour in Astral Plane Drifter derives from its protagonist’s delusions of grandeur. For as we watch this would-be guardian of the world and model of enlightenment take on space vampires, snake people and the Luciferian alien exile GalaxiKhan (John J. Jordan), all in cosmic clashes that disrupt the space-time continuum, we are aware – as the Drifter is not – that really he is just a hopeless doper living off others’ long abandoned pizza slices and lost to the wild hallucinations of his ongoing bender. “I don’t know, man. I’m not sure I should be drinking any more weird shit today,” the Drifter says to himself when confronted, like Alice in Wonderland, with a bottle accompanied by instructions to sit and drink its mysterious contents. Yet this moment of self-awareness proves very short-lived, as he adds, “But it could be the key to the answers I’ve been looking for,” and swigs down the lot. The Drifter cannot help himself, and helps others, we suspect, only in his chemically unhinged imagination.
Meanwhile the Drifter’s desert adventures are presented via hilarious lo-fi effects (psychedelic colour correction and crotch lasers) and cheap props (GalaxiKhan literally wears a tinfoil hat); the Drifter’s ‘wise’ mentor (Todd ‘Quality’ Jaeger) is a sasquatch (or a person in a sasquatch costume) who lives in a UFO-shaped house; and in an evocation of Alex Cox’s similarly toned Repo Man (1984), the Drifter will, along with fellow tokers the Sidekick and Uncle Wizard (Mike Rad), take one final trip into the cosmos in an old white Pontiac. Although all of this is focalised through the Drifter’s addled brain, viewers hoping to harmonise fully with that mindset will probably need to have what he’s having. It will certainly alter the film’s impact, and possibly guide the viewer towards seeing god in this intoxicated slacker’s amusingly schlubby escapades.
strap: Scott Slone’s lysergic comedy oater sci-fi whatsit sees a stoner chasing his own chemical delusions on a quest for elusive enlightenment
© Anton Bitel
