Sign of Aquarius (1970) User Reviews (5)

Hippie Heaven?

[sol1218 · 5/10 · 16 March 2006]

**SOME SPOILERS** Taking place in the cold and hard winter of 1970 in the slums of Cleveland Ohio instead of the tranquil and pleasant 1967 Summer of Love in the Haight Asbuary district of San Francisco. "Ghetto Freaks" is a film that tries to show it's viewers the life and philosophy of a hippie commune and how it, lead by their Guru Sonny, goes through life on the mean streets of a large northern industrial city.

Sonny who's having trouble keeping the women members of his hippie group from not trying to form any meaningful relationship with him is also being pressured by his former drug supplier Billy Moose to get back pushing his junk on the streets and to his fellow hippies.

We see at the beginning of the movie Sonny and his friends doing their thing and then being run in by the Cleveland Police for unlawful assembly in a local park. Getting out within hours after their arrest the hippie's go back to their loft and start to get high on pot and do sex as well as plan their next move in their war against the establishment; which is demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and the exploitation of the masses by those in power.

There's nothing really new in the movie we get a number of songs and orgies along with the hippies dancing to them. There's this scene of a young hippie girl afraid of being pregnant, it turned out she wasn't, and while high on drugs feeling that she's about to give birth to a new planet, or world, instead of a baby. Later in the movie at a hippie nightclub with Sonny & friends the police raid the place to find Diana, a teenage runaway, who's parents want to prevent from going into the hippie lifestyle and ending up a drug addict or even worse. Sonny spotting the young and pretty Diana, between tripping out and having sex with his hippie girlfriend Clara, takes a shine to her and slips Diana his name and address for future reference.

The next day Diana shows up at Sonny's pad asking him to take her in as a fellow hippie which Sonny does without as much as a second thought. Giving Diana the lowdown on what's expected of her by him and his fellow hippies by her getting high on drugs and having unrestricted sex as well as panhandling to get money to pay the rent. Diana immediately gets involved in a drug induced sex session with him that ends up with the entire group joining in.

Out on the bitter cold streets of downtown Cleveland Sonny and his gang, including Diana, are later seen hassling and pestering pedestrians for money handing out what looks like super-marker flayers to people for whatever anyone, insane enough to buy them, would pay for them. This entire scene looks like it was filmed on the spot with the unsuspecting people on the street not knowing that they'll end up in the movie. The hassled and pestered pedestrians for the most part let Sonny and his friends have it about getting a job a bath and getting out of their faces.

Sonny who seemed to have become a hippie to get away from his previous life as a drug pusher has been given the word, by his fellow hippie Mousey, that his former boss Billy Moose want's to talk to him about getting back as one of his drug dealers. Billy Moose feeling that his hippie friends would be a study source of income in buying his junk. Sonny, now a reformed man, for his part want's nothing to do with Billy Moose or his drugs.

Being a man that doesn't take no for an answer Billy Moose has his thugs work over Sonny leaving him unconscious with a possible fractured skull for turning down his offer. The next day we see Sonny, and his fellow hippies, without a mark on him out in the park again demonstrating against the "Evil Establishment" and almost getting beat up or run in by the very angry upright and working-class people. The very people who Sonny & Co. are supposed to be demonstrating for.

Things get a bit confusing when we then see Billy Moose with his head bashed in and face black and blue getting his boys together to knock off Sonny claiming that he was the one who beat him up. I got the impression that Billy Moose got his injuries from getting high and then falling on his head and breaking it! Since we never saw Sonny lay as much as a hand on Billy Moose in the entire movie! Unless this assault on Moose was supposed to have happened off screen or ended up being edited out of the film!

Determined to do in Sonny Billy Moose spots him and his fellow hippies, including Diana, walking down the street one evening and opens fire on them hitting and killing Diana. The movie ends with Sonny and his hippie commune friends glumly standing in shock over Diana's body as the police and para medics arrive to take her away to the local morgue.

The movie "Ghetto Freaks" tries to show the hippie lifestyle of the late 1960's and early 1970's USA and does a pretty decent job of it. Were not shown that being a hippie was so great like most films with bigger budgets and well known actors and actresses did back then. But were shown instead that it was a dog eat dog existence where every day living in it could be your last like it turned out to be for poor and naive Diana.

People as incoherent as the times they lived in

[rander-88123 · 5/10 · 19 December 2020]

Once you strip away the climate of Southern California and replace it with winter in some (maybe even then?) Rust Belt dump of a city, you have little left but the drug-addled meanderings of a would-be commune leader (oops, forgot; they don't have leaders) and his rag-tag hanger's on. They hold rally (only attended by their group) in a park, which some cops break-up, then one of them pushes a cop down and they do a night in jail. But it's a far cry from how they'd be treated today, they (if it was even realistic) had it easy. They are truly a rudderless group. Panhandling for the "cause" and doing little else of substance. The casting is questionable. The main actor looks like he's in his mid-30's. Hardly a "youth-quaker." Between saying, "man" a hundred times, there is no love here. This reminds me that 1970 was a turning point in the hippy culture, long past its sell-by date. Want to see a better movie of the time? Watch, "Joe."

Cool dancing at the party! And a whole lot of nothing :(

[holynosmoke · 4/10 · 16 September 2023]

I love digging up obscure hippie movies. Finally I got around to watching this beast. The premise is certainly promising: a hippie commune in Cleveland, Ohio rollicks through the freezing wintertime.

Unfortunately this film was a complete letdown to me. The acting is nothing to write about, the characters are undeveloped and there is no significant plot to speak of, other than the main guy trying to score chicks and stop dealing dope for the mafia. They are a commune, and at the end they protest against the war, but what are they really about?

What is most missing in this film is meaningful conversation. The characters do not rise above "Peace, man" and "They don't listen to us". That is understandable, since the commune never does anything interesting (except go to a nightclub) or speak of interesting things. The acid trip scene is beyond (s)exploitation bad. Frankly, they're a boring group.

Highlight is the nightclub scene, with some average psychedelic rock but very high quality dancing. Either they had some professionals, or those people were in sync with mind and body.

If you are looking for movies with more emotion (the end of this film was insulting in that regard) and meaningful conversation, look for CAPTAIN MILKSHAKE, RAINBOW BRIDGE and THE SKI BUM.

Meandering 70s Hippies Headed For Nowheresville in Downtown Cleveland

[jfrentzen-942-204211 · 3/10 · 6 April 2020]

The film is more interesting as a relic of a bygone era than a coherent theatrical work. Bobby is an ex-pusher that has settled in an urban hippie commune, circa 1970, struggling to survive with a rag-tag bunch that appear bored most of the time but sometimes take to the streets to protest ("Peace, Luv, not War!" etc.), conduct anti-war meetings in a city park, get busted by cops, engage in some obnoxious panhandling ("This is our work"), get stoned and revel in nude dancing. As a film, GHETTO FREAKS (a.k.a, SIGN OF AQUARIUS, LOVE COMMUNE) is no more consequential than the lives of these "lost soul"-type hippies, and unreels a plot-less scenario that mostly centers around Bobby, his relationships with the commune members and his attempt to get free of his violent gangster past.

Director Emery is compassionate to the late-60s youth protest ethic, but there is hardly any story to justify up the running time. Although these kids, including Bobby, are shown as rebels with a real cause (anti-Vietnam War) they are also cynically portrayed as having no future. Emery's semi-documentary shooting style is a plus, but his characters are underdeveloped or unsympathetic (Bobby being the main culprit here), and the dialogue is mostly aimless and seems improvised. An overlong orgy scene, featuring enough nudity to warrant the film's original X-rating from the MPAA, is symptomatic of how most scenes tend to drag on with little import, and with histrionics that take place in a vacuum because we never get to know the characters well enough.

Two interesting scenes hint at the movie's undeveloped potential: When furious parents interrupt the commune's antics to try to remove their hippie daughter; and a street protest in which a middle-class working stiff argues uselessly with the self-absorbed hippies.

Hippies in Winter: The Other Side of Paradise...

[Atomic_Brain · 10/10 · 21 April 2021]

Good gosh, this is a great time capsule of an era long gone, incorrectly romanticized by some. Rather than depicting the bland, colorful, squeaky-clean hippies of Southern California, Ghetto Freaks (originally Sign of Aquarius) depicts, in vivid relief, the rise and fall of a gang of losers and misfits in dreary Cleveland, Ohio, and depicts the communal lifestyle as anything but prosaic. The film juggles high melodrama with a neo-realist sensibility which is compelling, and there really is no other film quite like it in depicting "another side" of this fetishized cultural moment. For instance, cinema verite scenes of the hippies literally begging for pennies in a crowd of hostile passerby looks unrehearsed, and the largely negative reaction of citizens looks all too real. Back at the crash pad, drug-fueled sex orgies collapse into the stark early morning reality of cold and want. Angry and sometimes violent police are always after the gang, and they are no strangers to unjust incarceration. Plus, the uneasy alliance between the peace-loving hippies and the decidedly less noble criminal underworld proves their undoing, with their common bond being recreational drugs. The hippie cult has an ostensible leader, and this charismatic bum really sets the agenda for the otherwise rudderless group, illustrating a truth unpalatable to some: human nature dictates that any group will be a hotbed of power struggles, and there really is no such thing as a truly egalitarian enclave. Yet scenes of our poor, starving and underdressed hippies literally freezing to death in a harsh Cleveland winter, tromping about in the snow looking for spare change, are so somber as to be almost unbearably documentary in nature, and give lie to the notion of the sunny, tanned and healthy hippies depicted in much popular culture. One notable scene depicts a young woman suffering a "bad trip," as she realizes under the throes of drug-induced insight that the baby she carries in her womb is the beginning, for her, of an unending nightmare of horror; you don't often see explicit anti-natalist messages even in indie films of this vintage, so this is a candid and refreshing moment. The film also offers some incredible scenes of real area night clubs, featuring groovy dancing by real people, another amazing "time capsule" moment which should be dear to any true film buff. But all good things must come to an end, and when a young innocent unwisely joins the group, her tragic and sudden downfall echos the death of the group also, showing that for all its good intentions, anti-war and free-love movements cannot survive in a brutally Darwinist, predatory Capitalist culture. As the gang sings "We are the Aquarians," after laying to rest their fallen virgin sacrifice, it sounds more like a dirge than an anthem, denoting the death of (collective and individual) innocence, and signaling the ominous approach of something darker, and deadly. Call this great movie "The Other Side of Paradise..." (For the Ghetto Freaks release, the insertion of a wholly specious faux-ritual, lead by a woman in a ridiculous white Afro wig, takes up about two minutes and does not diminish the power of the main feature at all; indeed, this strange scene passes by like a fever dream.)