Gary Kent

(On Cable TV, January 2021) The crew at Turner Classic Movie’s TCM Underground (all hail Milli di Chirico) rarely do better than when they unearth some kind of deep oddity from the archives rather than play it safe by the usual cult classics. And—whew—they got something special with The Pyramid, an aimless low-budget curio from 1976 that plays like an acid flashback to the anxieties of another generation. The plot apparently has to do with a disillusioned Dallas journalist going on a quest to cover more positive stories, but in practice the film plays like an episodic collection of mid-1970s obsessions and fantasies, slathered in unimaginative but representative social commentary. Writer-director Gary Kent doesn’t aim at (let alone approach) any kind of cinematic greatness here: the audiovisual quality of the film is terrible, and the screenwriting approaches incompetence at its best. Plot threads come and go, “characters” take a back seat to hippie-in-the-street interviews, and the titular pyramid is some kind of new age construction that shows up late in the film without much of an explanation or payoff. From a shocking true-news opening, the film drifts even closer to new-age mumbo-jumbo about the post-1960s Age of Aquarius or somesuch. The meandering forward rhythm even weaves in a surprising reference to the JFK assassination, which is probably de rigueur for a regional film that seems to prefigure a good chunk of Richard Linklater’s filmography. It’s weird in a way that only undisciplined productions from the mid-1970s could be, and I would relish getting a chance to learn more about the film’s production. Until then, I can count myself lucky to have caught The Pyramid on a rare Canadian broadcast—it’s not good and I did not like it, but I feel as if I’ve learned something by watching it.