by Buzz Drainpipe, written while chain-smoking menthols under a lava lamp tuned to static
“Sometimes the only way out is to crash the bus.”
That’s the ethos that binds End of the Road and The Ninth Configuration—two wrecking-ball visions of America’s cracked psyche, both anchored by the jowled, feverish gravitas of Stacy Keach. These aren’t just films. They’re psychic ruptures, baroque dirges disguised as cinema, the kind of movies that would be playing on the TV in your motel room just as you’re slipping into a mescaline coma.
Welcome to Season of the Keach—where reality melts, institutions implode, and the only sane man is the one who’s gone totally mad.
END OF THE ROAD (1970)
Directed by Aram Avakian. Written by Terry Southern from the John Barth novel.
Imagine Easy Rider if it had gone to grad school, taken too much Thorazine, and been locked in a basement with a malfunctioning film projector. That’s End of the Road. A bureaucratic burlesque. A nervous breakdown filmed in collage. The satire is razor-toothed and absurdist, with jagged cuts and intertitles that feel like they were yanked from the Book of Revelations.
Stacy Keach plays Jacob Horner, a man who suffers from "cosmopsis"—total existential overload. After a surrealist train station freakout, he's sent to a bizarre, Orwellian clinic run by a white-suited Doctor (James Earl Jones!) who treats mental illness with a blend of erotic shock therapy and philosophical nonsense. Eventually, Horner is released into the wild to become a teacher at a Kafkaesque college and gets tangled in a doomed love triangle that ends in blood, abortion, and total psychic collapse.
Why it rules:
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The editing is pure gonzo. You don’t watch this movie—you fall through it like a bad trip.
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Keach gives a performance that’s both frozen and twitching, like a man too aware of his own irrelevance.
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It’s the closest cinema has come to mimicking the sensation of reading a footnote-heavy academic paper while being waterboarded.
Buzz Drainpipe Verdict:
A film so cynical, so raw, it somehow loops back into being tender. This is the dead-end American Dream as envisioned by a man with a dislocated jaw and a degree in semiotics. You don’t recover from it. You assimilate it.
THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)
Directed and written by William Peter Blatty (yes, Exorcist Blatty).
This is Catch-22 by candlelight. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dipped in theology and military dread. And MASH* if it were haunted by Kierkegaard.
Stacy Keach—now older, gaunter, with the weight of a thousand unslept nights—plays Colonel Kane, who arrives at a gothic castle being used as an experimental military psychiatric facility. His job is to determine which of the patients are faking and which are truly lost. The inmates include a Shakespeare-reciting astronaut, a man trying to stage Hamlet with dogs, and a host of unhinged characters. But Kane himself may be the most fractured soul of all.
Why it rules:
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The dialogue swings between Monty Python absurdity and apocalyptic confessionals.
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The cinematography is austere and reverent, like a cathedral made of concrete and shadow.
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Keach is devastating. Calm, gentle, and harboring a void the size of God. His monologues about sacrifice, sin, and grace are whispered like prayers from a man who knows damnation personally.
There’s a bar fight that feels like a holy war. A moment of martyrdom so raw it could sandpaper your bones. And an ending so tender and terrifying, you’ll feel like you’ve been kissed on the forehead by a dying angel.
Buzz Drainpipe Verdict:
A cracked theological treatise disguised as a war movie. It’s the rare film that dares to ask if madness might be the only rational response to evil. Blatty should’ve made ten more movies. Keach’s performance here is canon-worthy.
THE SEASON ITSELF: KEACH IN COLLAPSE
In both films, Keach plays men teetering on the edge of obliteration—one because of meaninglessness, the other because of meaning. Where End of the Road is a scream into the postmodern void, The Ninth Configuration is a whisper that maybe—just maybe—there’s something holy in the wreckage.
Together, these films bracket a decade of disillusionment, from the acid-burnt end of the '60s to the cold ecclesiastical hangover of the '80s. They’re about institutions—schools, hospitals, the military—failing to contain the soul’s implosion. And Keach? He’s the poet of that implosion. A face built for collapse. A voice built for confession.
FINAL RATING:
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END OF THE ROAD: 5/5 shattered tenure reviews
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THE NINTH CONFIGURATION: 5/5 God-haunted moonshots
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