Picking a movie to review for this blog doesn't take a whole lot of effort. A lot of the time, it's just as simple as me stumbling across a movie and thinking it might be fun to write about. But there's been the rare occasion where I'll see a movie and realize that not only am I a fool for having watched more than ten minutes of it, but that I just had to post something about it.
Such was the case with Reefer Madness. Yes, the legendary anti-marijuana propaganda movie from the '30s. I'd have probably never bothered watching it at all if Netflix didn't carry a DVD of Reefer Madness featuring a satirical commentary from the RiffTrax crew. And I'm a sucker for RiffTrax, if anything, so I rented the DVD and couldn't believe my eyes. I was simply amazed at just how terrible the movie is. So let's dig into Reefer Madness and I'll try explaining just how bad it really is.
The movie quickly introduces us to Mae Coleman (Thelma White) and Jack Perry (Carleton Young), a pair of pot dealers. While neither have any moral problems with peddling their illegal wares, they disagree on who their target market should be. Mae prefers to sell only to adults who know what they're getting into, while Jack goes out of his way to push it on teenagers.
Helping Jack are Ralph (Dave O'Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles), who act as Jack's go-betweens by inviting high schoolers and college students to house parties so Jack can make a few sales. It is at one of these parties that the lives of several characters begin spiraling out of control.
When a young man named Bill (Kenneth Craig) attends one of these parties and gets roped into the world of marijuana, his grades start slipping, and he stops interacting with his parents and friends. He even starts having a few rounds in the bedroom with Blanche. His girlfriend Mary (Dorothy Short) arrives at Mae and Jack's apartment looking for him, but ends up being taken advantage of by Ralph. Bill, stoned out of his mind, stumbles into the room and attacks Ralph. Jack tries breaking things up and in the ensuing fight, Mary is shot and killed. Things only start going downhill from there, all because of that damnable reefer.
I've never smoked weed, nor do I ever plan to. But even if I did, I could tell you that Reefer Madness is a tremendously stupid movie. It's grossly inaccurate, for starters, and it's lacking in anything that even remotely resembles common sense. I know that most of these propaganda movies don't exactly care about the facts, but Reefer Madness is particularly bad about it. And it's just a bad movie in general, too.
Directing this little project is a guy named Louis Gasnier, a French filmmaker whose work I'm unfamiliar with. And I'll probably stay unfamiliar with it, since Reefer Madness is the only one of his movies I've actually heard of. The real problem with Gasnier's direction, besides the terrible editing, is that the movie is just plain boring. The movie is supposed to be a prime example of unintentional camp, but it took all of my effort to pay attention to the damn thing. I was continually looking at the clock, trying to gauge how much time was left. Bad movies are one thing, but boring bad movies are insufferable.
The acting is far from good, too. None of the actors in this are worth watching, to put it bluntly. I can get over the so-called "teenage" actors all looking like they're in their thirties, but their lack of talent or even the ability to try being convincing is annoying. There's not one performance in this thing to tell you about. I couldn't even find a single, solitary well-acted scene or well-delivered line of dialogue. It's just pathetic.
But the worst element of the whole thing is the script. The badly written, totally ignorant script. Credited to Arthur Hoerl from an "original story" by Lawrence Meade, the script is about as braindead as you can get. The fact of the matter is that the only reason Reefer Madness is a cult classic at all is because of how misinformed it is about marijuana (or as the movie spells it, "marihuana"). The script actually includes dialogue about how weed is more dangerous than heroin. No kidding, the movie tries to make the argument that marijuana is worse for you than heroin. There's no way they could be serious, because that's an outright lie. Not only that, but the movie depicts marijuana use as having consequences that no pothead I've ever met has suffered. I'm astounded by just how wrong the movie is.
For quite some time, Reefer Madness has been touted as a campy exploitation movie that borders on the salacious. Turns out its reputation has been overblown. The movie is a terrible waste of time, one that is only enjoyable if you've smoked a whole pound of weed. While Reefer Madness is the movie's most famous title (it was originally called Tell Your Children and was given multiple titles on the exploitation movie circuit), crap is still crap no matter what you call it. And thus, I'll ask that you skip Reefer Madness altogether. This mess could use a little less attention.
Final Rating: *
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