Keep Off My Grass! (1975)

• 74%
• 1975
• Comedy
• Shelley Berman
• Micky Dolenz
• Marcus J. Grapes
• Gary Wood

The well-meaning but hopelessly square merchants of a small southern town are fed up with the crowds of hippies lounging around on the sidewalks outside their businesses. One of the merchants, whose college-age son has hippie sympathies (and a hippie girlfriend) comes up with a novel solution: buy a ramshackle ghost town nearby, and deed it over to the hippies-if they'll only move there. Intrigued by the offer, and challenged to live out their ideals, the hippies relocate to their new Utopian commune, which they name Violets. Condemned buildings and tumble-down shacks don't discourage these long-haired homesteaders; they quickly set about repairing their homes and establishing an idealistic social order. The innocent entrepreneur horticulturalist nicknamed "You Know" (Micky Dolenz) plants his one baby marijuana plant and puts up a tiny picket fence around it. But pressures come from within and from without. Violets cannot sustain itself without doing business with the outside world, and the outside world is disgusted by the community of hippies. What's worse, the hippie utopia slowly beings to stratify into an approximation of the capitalistic society it had tried to flee. Keep Off My Grass is a fable in the tradition of Orwell's Animal Farm: All hippies are equal, but some hippies are more equal than others.