"In trying to visualize a notion of what Peter Fonda goes through on an LSD trip, Roger Corman has simply resorted to a long succession of familiar cinematic images, accompanied by weird music and sounds...Is this a psychedelic experience? Is this what it's like to take a trip? If it is, then it's all a big put-on. Or is this simply making a show with adroitly staged fantasy episodes and good color photography effects? In my estimation, it is the latter. And I would warn you that all you are likely to take away from [The Trip] is a painful case of eye-strain and perhaps a detached retina."
-- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"As a far-out, free-floating LSD freakout, The Trip should provide enough psychedelic jolts, sexsational scenes and mind-blowing montages and optical effects to prove a box-office magnet for the youth market."
-- Variety

"The Trip amounts to very little more than an hour-and-a-half commercial for LSD...Neither Mr. Fonda nor Miss Strasberg is left with any place to go but 'up' after this movie. The subject matter of The Trip enables the director to make a totally incoherent movie with erratic, repetitious and fake-arty effects that simply nauseate, both intellectually and physically."
-- Judith Crist, The Today Show

"The Trip is a psychedelic tour through the bent mind of Peter Fonda, which is evidently full of old movies. In a flurry of flesh, mattresses, flashing lights and kaleidoscopic patterns, an alert viewer will spot some fancy business from such classics as The Seventh Seal [1957], Lawrence of Arabia [1962], even The Wizard of Oz [1939]."
-- Time

"The Trip pulls no punches. This is a smash commercial picture on the national youth problem of taking psychedelic drugs."
-- Boxoffice

"With The Trip, Roger Corman has made his best picture to date...it has its unusual and experimental aspects and is a quite remarkable venture of so totally an exploitation-minded firm as American International, under whose aegis Corman flourishes."
-- Hollis Alpert, The Saturday Review

"Whether or not [Corman] succeeded in [his] aim can only be attested to by those who are users of the chemical. However, judging the result from the purely cinematic standpoint, it can be said that The Trip is technically and visually one of the most spectacular pictures ever made."
-- American Cinematographer

"Roger Corman and Peter Fonda, trying to do for LSD what they did for motorcycles in The Wild Angels [1966]. It doesn't take, perhaps because a subject so passive doesn't lend itself to the action requirements of exploitation films. But there is a very funny scene in a laundromat with Fonda freaking out on a clothes dryer."
-- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"An earlier Corman picture, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes [1963], had uncannily predicted the rise and fall of a Timothy Leary-type hero, whose desire to see beyond human limits was punished by humiliation as a sideshow freak and by self-inflicted blindness. The Trip, a definitive commercial for acid scripted by Jack Nicholson, is in contrast boundlessly optimistic...Despite the hedonistic panache, its lack of a comeuppance means it now lacks credence (as it once lacked a censor's certificate). Rich pickings for the pathologist of '60s life-styles, but it took Coppola to work out that the best movies were about bad trips, not good ones."
TimeOut Film Guide

"The Trip has several good performances despite the dated nature of Jack Nicholson's rather good script. Everyone says 'groovy' at least 5 times each, which I must sadly report was perfectly accurate for the lingo of 1966/67. Peter Fonda isn't bad at all as the day-tripping advertising guy with a vague soul-sickness; this is before the drearily-affected persona that dominated his post-Easy Rider pictures. He's actually kind of square and has a friendly, innocent smile."
- Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

Compiled by Bret Wood