When I watched Wild in the Streets a long time ago, I really liked it. But watching it again was more entertaining than I remembered. It turns out that it is a lot funnier than I remembered. But not intentionally funny.
The movie was intended as a warning to the country about what would happen if the voting age was ever lowered to 18. Christopher Jones plays Max Frost a politically-active version of Jim Morrison. Once the voting age gets lowered he gets one of his band members elected to congress and introduces a bill to get the age to hold all offices in the United States lowered to 14.
Once he becomes president he spends his time staggering around the White House spouting cliché-ridden, hippie-speak and has the rest of the kids round up everyone over 35 and sends them to LSD fueled Happy concentration camps.
Shelly Winters is great as his harpy mother who drives her son out of the house with her henpecking. (A great touch in retrospect is that the young Max is played by Barry Williams, Greg Brady of the Brady Bunch.) Once she realizes that he is a success, she tries to worm her way back into his life, only to end up arrested by her son's right hand man, Stanley X (Richard Pryor).
Hal Holbrook also plays a great turn as the Senator who initially courts the youth vote and then is trapped when it turns against him.
While at the beginning the movie pretends to be a part of the 1960s Counter Culture, it is clear that this movie intends to be a warning to the chaos that would overrun the country if the fascist, free-loving, power hungry, acid tripping hippies ever gained any kind of power. I almost wish that this is what had happened when they lowered the voting age; it is more entertaining than our real history.