Director William A. Castleman brings us this hard bitten tale of a 70's Club band ("The Group" as "The Band" was taken) trying to make it in L. A. The Group is managed by (Morie) the beautiful Leslie Mcray. The undisputed leader of The Group is the singer (Duke) played quite well by Kipp Whitman. Duke is frustrated with The Groups status as a Club Band and Morie tells him he will have to hit the road to make money. The other band members are kind of nondescript with the exception of the emotionally troubled bass player (Butts) in Dennis Burkley's first movie roll. The Group has their groupies including rich girl Barbara (Connie Strickland) who incidentally has a great body and (Dolly) Diane Lee Hart who shares a flop house room with the third groupie (Janyce) Carol Speed.
The girls have some real adventures including a tryout at a topless bar and being recruited by, (Sid Rosen) played with a lot of glee by Jay Adler, to be call girls. The girls stick to being groupies and plan to follow the fellas around. The Group heads out to a gig in Bakersfield but dumb ass Butts attempts to rape a girl in The Groups van which gets them fired from the gig so they return to LA and reunite with the girls. It's unfortunate that The Group as a band was terrible. It would have helped the film if they would have had at least one tune that was good.
Bummer really tries to explore the relationship between the girls who all want to have serious relationships with the members of The Group and the guy's sincere reaction to them. The film becomes quite gritty and is indeed a Bummer with Duke rebuffing the pleas of manager Morry to fire Butts because Duke as the leader is loyal to his psychopathic band mate. There are some quite uncomfortable scenes with Butts forcing the Girls to strip and some weird S&M stuff involving Butts. Bummer pulled me in, and I actually cared about stressed out Duke and especially the Girls. I have been a bit melancholy since watching it yesterday.
Bummer is a Jack Starrett type film that is a weird and brutal slice of life which I recommend as long as you know what your getting yourself into.
