The free movie we’re featuring for this week’s Friday Fright Nights is the drug-fueled horror movie Trip, starring Akasha Villalobos
A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Horror Movies YouTube channel every day of the week – but on Fridays things get even freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
The Friday Fright Nights feature we have for you this week is writer/director Neil McCay’s Trip, which was just released into the world back in May of 2022. This movie was described in one review as “a cross between a haunted house film, a psychological thriller, and a drugsploitation film”, which – along with the title – gives away the fact that there are going to be a good amount of odd visions on display in the movie. Normally I’m not into movies that make you wonder what’s real and what isn’t through the use of hallucinations, visions, or nightmares. If Freddy Krueger isn’t involved, I’m not really a fan of being shown dreams or visions… but Trip does earn points from the fact that it keeps the story moving along at a good pace.
Trip has the following synopsis (provided to IMDb by McCay himself): Following her daughter’s suicide, a grief-stricken mother is visited by an unconventional therapist who offers a hallucinogenic drug that will allow communion with the dead. Desperate to understand her daughter’s psyche, she accepts the offer and soon finds herself terrorized by her daughter’s identical experiences.
That makes it sound like a good amount of running time will have gone by before the grieving mother is ever offered the hallucinogenic drug (brewed in a tea) that kicks off her titular “trip”. But the tea has been given to the mother very early on – within the first 15 minutes, in fact. That’s definitely the kind of pacing I can appreciate.
Trip stars Akasha Villalobos, Major Dodge, Peggy Schott, Jill Young, Laura Ray, Jonny Blackburn, Kerri van Auken, and Aurora Villalobos, with Bjorgvin Arnarson of the Chucky television series as the “Boy in Red Scarf”. Akasha Villalobos actually carries the majority of the film on her shoulders, and turns in a strong performance while doing so.
This film is the second feature film McCay has directed, coming along sixteen years after his debut feature, a drama called Eleven. Will he make a third feature before another sixteen years pass by? We’ll just have to wait and see. I have never seen Eleven, but McCay did a decent job with Trip. And the synopsis for his previous movie makes it sound like it might be one worth seeking out: “This is the story behind Lucifer Cicero, the worst movie ever made. A documentarian interviews a once prominent screenwriter about a failed film’s transformation in to a cult phenomenon. A complex tale unfolds, involving a dying woman and a man seeking closure. The two walk parallel paths in life, ultimately shaping events that forever alter the small town of Lake Ridge.”
But first, before we go off and find our copies of Eleven, take a look at Trip – after all, it’s free! – and let us know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below or on the YouTube page. Would you like to see another Neil McCay movie before 2038?
Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/friday-fright-nights-trip/
