REEFER MADNESS (or: TELL YOUR CHILDREN) (1936)
Directed by Louis Gasnier
Starring: Dorothy Short, Kenneth Craig, Lillian Miles, Dave O'Brien, Thelma White, Norman McCollum, Carleton Young
Here we have a film that has had quite a life on the Midnight Movie circuit. It's developed a solid cult following on college campuses and anywhere bad cinema is appreciated. So I decided to find out what all the buzz (hahaha) was about. And for the record, I was stone-cold sober while watching it.
The film begins with a disclaimer that what we are about to see is pretty intense. But if it stops even one kid from getting hooked on marihuana (sic), it'll all be worth it. So strap yourselves in folks, because the first thing we see is...a PTA meeting. Scandalous! We get about five minutes worth of debriefing as to what marihuana is, where it comes from and how it's distributed before we finally get to our story, which involves two dope peddlers, Mae (White) and Jack (Young). Mae likes to sell to people her own age, while Jack and his associates, Ralph (O'Brien) and Blanche (Miles), think the future of the dope business lies with the high school crowd. He targets young Bill Harper (Craig) and his buddy Jimmy Lane (McCollum), and brings them over to Mae's apartment for a reefer party. But they just forgot one thing: the reefers. So Jimmy offers to drive Jack downtown to get some. On the way, Jimmy asks Jack for a perfectly harmless tobacco cigarette, but unbeknowst to him, he gets the Devil Weed. This makes him extremely excited and on the way back, they run over a pedestrian, not really caring about it. Once back at the flat, Bill takes his first toke from Blanche and is immediately hooked. He's over at Mae's real regular now, man. And his sister Mary (Short) goes looking for him when he doesn't come home from school one day. He finds her at Mae's, involved in a tawdry affair with Blanche. Ralph likes what he sees in Mary and tries to take advantage of her. Bill comes out hallucinates that his sister is stripping for Ralph, which makes him spring into action against him. Jack hears the commotion (even though he didn't hear Mary screaming, for some reason) and bursts in, gun at the ready. During the scuffle, however, it goes off and Mary is killed. Bill goes on trial for killing his own sister. Ralph becomes paranoid and does nothing but smoke weed constantly. Eventually, when Jack tries to kill Ralph, the police raid the apartment. Blanche comes forward with the truth about what happened and Bill is exonerated. After she signs a confession, she - for some reasons - leaps out of the window to her death. Now, the tale having been told, we are back at the PTA meeting, where we are warned to TELL YOUR CHILDREN.
All of this sounds like more fun than it really is. The film is horribly and terribly made. Even the supposedly salacious scenes of illicit drug use and wanton sex don't really help it. It's like putting gourmet meat on moldy bread and calling it a sandwich. The acting is terrible, the sound is so muddled you can't make out what anyone is saying half the time, and the story is too convoluted to be crammed into 67 minutes. As such, it's not even entertaining as bad cinema. About the only bright spot is Dave O'Brien as Ralph. His scenes of dope-induced paranoia are pretty funny. Other than that, it's a bore. And badly made bore, at that.
Really, the only people who would appreciate this film are those who are long-time pot smokers. The accusations about weed are pretty ludicrous, and obviously very little research was done. I know pot smokers (and have even tried it myself a few times, though I gave it up), and not one of them acted as if they were on speed, or hallucinated. In fact, if they ever watched this movie on a lark, they'd probably fall asleep. The film might be appreciated as a curiosity, but not much else. Tell your children to avoid it.
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