It isn't often that I get a chance to watch our weekly wheel of cheese just days before posting. But Princess Di and I spent Tuesday night "researching" 1968's counterculture howl Wild in the Streets, TiVo'd from the MGM channel, so check your guide for repeats.

Plug this baby into a double feature with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (which ran on IFC last night) and you'll have a classic evening of cinetrash.

Wild in the Streets stars James Dean lookalike Christopher Jones as rock star Max Frost, who's enlisted by a crafty politician (Hal Holbrook) to court America's youth, many of whom aren't old enough to vote anyway but that's part of the far-out fantasy here.

Max worms his way into the system, getting the voting age lowered to 14
then getting elected president. Of course, dosing old timers with LSD
on election night helps, keeping them tripping and away from the polls

Cheering on Max is his bandmate, Stanley X, played by young Richard Pryor. The soundtrack offers juicy slices of '60s rock, including the earworm Shape of Things to Come that eventually ended up in a Target ad. Wonder what Max would think of that?

Max's first presidential decree is that everyone over 30 will be rounded up -- including his mother (Shelley Winters, a dead ringer for my mom) -- and housed in retirement compounds where more acid will keep them docile. Any resemblance between these compounds and Nazi death camps is purely intentional.

Jones has a crash-and-burn biography worth checking out: born into poverty to a mother soon institutionalized for mental illness, thrust into the Actors Studio thanks his Dean resemblance where he clashed with legendary teacher Lee Strasberg but married his daughter Susan (maybe for spite), becoming a shooting star with Wild in the Streets, leading to starring in Ryan's Daughter, the final film from directing legend David Lean, who had to dub Jones' mumbled dialogue and ruin the movie.

There are also connections to Manson family victim Sharon Tate, whose murder drove Jones into semi-seclusion, emerging only once on screen afterward. Jones turned down the role of "Zed" in Pulp Fiction (you know Tarantino would love this guy) but took a role in 1996's shambling Mad Dog Time as a favor to Wild in the Streets co-star Larry Bishop (son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop... oh, how the wheel of cheese turns).

Enjoy!