The Tripper is a 2006 American comedy slasher film directed by David Arquette and starring Jaime King, Thomas Jane, and Lukas Haas.
The film, Arquette's directorial debut, is about a group of hippies at a music festival who get stalked by a madman dressed up like Ronald Reagan. The film took inspiration from Reagan's opposition to the environmental movement. Reagan's defunding of mental institutions through the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 is a major plot point, as the killer is one of the mental patients released due to the effects of the Act. Arquette intended the film to be a commentary on the policies of the Reagan Era.
Plot
In 1967, a young boy is watching a news report on TV of then-governor of California Ronald Reagan railing against the environmentalist movement. The boy's father, a local logger named Dylan Riggs, faces resistance from a group of tree-hugging hippies who will not allow him to clear the forest, despite how he needs the money to buy medicine for his ailing wife. A standoff between Dylan and the hippies ensues, following which Dylan's disturbed son takes a chainsaw to the neck of one of the protesters. The son is taken to a mental institution.
39 years later, a group of friends - Joey, Ivan, Samantha, Linda, Jade and Jack - are driving through the woods to the American Free Love Festival (a modern-day Woodstock festival) for a weekend of debauchery. During the journey, the group stops at a gas station to pick up supplies, only to run into a group of older hooligans, who begin threatening them. A fight ensues, which sees an older man named Gus breaking the arm of one of the hooligans.
Meanwhile, Frank Baker, the organizer for the event, is preparing for the festival, despite local police officer Buzz Hall reminding him that a girl had died at the one held the previous year. The festival begins anyway, but one festival goer gets killed by an unseen figure after wandering into the woods by himself. The next day, Linda and Joey head off into the woods by themselves to have sex, only to be ambushed by the hooligans with paintball guns. Suddenly, a man dressed like Ronald Reagan appears and murders all five of them.
Back at the festival, the headless body of an older hippie (killed earlier by Reagan) is found hanging from a tree. Buzz quickly orders the festival to be shut down, and tells the attendees to go home, much to the chagrin of Baker. Since Joey had the keys for their van, Samantha goes off looking for him, only to find a car belonging to her abusive ex-boyfriend Jimmy (whom she thinks has been following her over the past few days). Frightened, she flees back to the van, only to find that Jack and Jade have been murdered. Jimmy suddenly appears, holding a gun to Ivan's neck. Samantha confronts Jimmy, accusing him of murdering the others, but then Reagan appears and kills Jimmy and Ivan, upon which Samantha flees.
Meanwhile, Buzz, believing Dylan Riggs to be the killer, heads out to his shack, where he finds Dylan seemingly cutting up the bodies of the murdered victims. A chase begins, but it quickly ends after Dylan accidentally falls into his own punji stick trap, killing himself. Elsewhere, Reagan begins pursuing Baker, but he manages to escape by hiding in an outhouse toilet. Reagan then goes back to chasing after Samantha, when Buzz appears and shoots him down, seemingly killing him. Suddenly, Reagan pops back up, but Samantha is able to beat him down again with a hammer, knocking him out. She then demasks the killer, revealing him to be Gus, the man from the gas station who was also the son of Dylan who was inadvertently freed by the actual president when he defunded mental institutions in 1981.
The next morning, Samantha is escorted away from the woods by law enforcement, although Buzz learns that Gus's body wasn't found where it should have been. Meanwhile, Baker re-emerges from the outhouse and wanders off with his money into the woods, where Gus suddenly appears and murders him with a chainsaw.
Cast
Production
David Arquette came up with the idea for the film when he was at a reggae concert in Northern California. "We're surrounded by redwood trees and the redwood trees are always so creepy anyway. And I thought it would be crazy if a madman came out of the woods and started hacking up all these hippies," said Arquette.