Name: Keep Off My Grass!
Genre: Comedy
Duration: 1 h 30 min
Rating: 6.6
Cast: Micky Dolenz, Marcus J. Grapes, Gary Wood

Shaggy, Square Satire of 70s Hippie Culture

Keep Off My Grass is more interesting as a period artifact than as a movie. Comedian Shelley Berman's only directorial effort has a decent premise and a few flashes of acid-era perversity, but it mostly drifts into limp sitcom moralizing and long stretches of dead air.

Set somewhere between late-'60s counterculture fantasy and early-'70s generational backlash, Keep Off My Grass begins with a promising setup. A group of shop owners, tired of the hippies loitering outside their businesses and scaring off customers, come up with an oddly benevolent solution. They buy the kids an abandoned building and let them build their own commune. The longhairs take the deal and begin fixing it up into a self-styled utopia.

The film wants to show how quickly dropping out turns into buying in, and how a supposedly free commune can harden into another petty little society of rules, money, permits, and hierarchy. The hippies start recreating the same structures they thought they had escaped, right down to appointing one of their own as a cop. In theory, that is a sharp satirical idea. In practice, the film is too square, too muddled, and too dramatically inert to do much with it.

The satire never bites hard enough, and the comedy rarely lands. Berman seems content to "gently poke fun at both sides," but that leaves the film stranded in the least interesting middle ground. It's too soft to be a true send-up, too condescending to feel immersed in the world it depicts, and too clumsy to become a dark fable. Much of the movie plays like mainstream television writers trying to process hippie culture from a safe distance. That may not be surprising, given that writers Austin and Irma Kalish came out of TV comedy, but it leaves the movie feeling secondhand and awkwardly domesticated.

Micky Dolenz, as the aptly named You Know, gives the film what little spark it has. He plays a dim, horny, pot-growing innocent with enough bemused charm to keep the movie alive when he is on screen. But he is not in it nearly enough. Too much of the runtime is spent on a dull central couple debating whether marriage is too square, while secondary business involving a clinic doctor and prescription errands drags the film into a strange zone of medical and domestic tedium.

There are moments when the picture threatens to wake up. A sequence involving LSD-spiked ice cream gives the film a brief jolt of drive-in lunacy, and the darker turn involving a hippie's death suggests a more abrasive, unsettling movie trying to break through. But the film never commits. It keeps drifting back into a flat, under-powered rhythm, as if unsure whether it wants to be a satire, a sermon, or a sitcom.

The result is not a lost masterpiece or even much of a cult gem. It is an occasionally curious, often boring, and mostly unfunny relic from a moment when Hollywood was scrambling to make sense of youth culture after the fact.

What makes Keep Off My Grass more interesting today is its history. This was Berman's only feature directing effort, and was shot in and around New Orleans in early 1971. Trade coverage from the time identified executive producer Allan D. Yasnyi, with Austin and Irma Kalish handling post-production in Hollywood. The New Orleans setting gives the movie some regional texture, even if the production itself looks modest and underpowered.

Its release history is murky, which helps explain why the film is often mis-dated. Modern databases frequently list it as a 1975 film, but contemporary trade references show that it was already in circulation much earlier. It was listed for release in 1972, had a world premiere at the Panorama Theatre in New Orleans on September 20, 1972, and was still turning up in distribution listings in 1973. That suggests a scattered, limited release rather than any proper national rollout.

The weak paper trail around its release matches the weak response it appears to have received. Contemporary reaction was thin. A surviving Boxoffice review treated it as an uneven rebellion-versus-establishment story, and judged much of the acting mediocre, with Dolenz as the standout. The film seems to have played briefly, made little impression, and then more or less vanished.

Seen now, Keep Off My Grass is best understood as a fascinating failure -- a low-budget satire made by talented people from more mainstream comic traditions, arriving just as the counterculture moment it wanted to comment on was already slipping into caricature. It survives less as a successful film than as a snapshot of how dated the "hippie movie" already looked by the early 1970s.

The comedy genre refers to a category of entertainment that aims to amuse and entertain audiences by using humor, wit, and comedic situations. Comedies are created with the primary intention of eliciting laughter and providing lighthearted enjoyment. They encompass a wide range of styles, tones, and themes, appealing to various tastes and audiences.

Will Ferrell, Angela Grillo, and Lap-Gei Cheung in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

A group of merchants convinces the hippies who crowd the sidewalks of their town to start their own Utopian community in a nearby ghost town. Micky Dolenz appears as a sweet kid with a dream, tending to a single pot plant.

Get a closer look at some of Hollywood's perfect pairs.

Hollywood Power Couples

Get a closer look at some of Hollywood&#39;s perfect pairs.

See which big screen releases you can watch from the comfort of your couch.

Theatrical Releases Coming to Streaming

Get a closer look at these actors from their many TV and streaming series roles.

Keep Off My Grass!

Photos

Top Cast21

User reviews6

Related interests

Storyline

Did you know

Top picks

Details

Tech specs

Contribute to this page

More to explore

Recently viewed