REEFER MADNESS
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1936) 0
REEFER MADNESS is one of the most famous bad movies of all time. It's an ancient propaganda piece about the dangers of marijuana, "the new drug menace that is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers." An on-screen prologue tells us, "Something must be done to wipe out this ghastly menace," but obviously this movie isn't the thing to do it. If anything, it has prompted sixty years worth of teenagers to try pot for the first time and countless others to laugh hysterically at some of the worst acting and preposterous dialogue in cinema history.
The movie centers around a clean-cut WASP couple, Bill and Mary, who spend their days playing tennis and drinking tea on the back porch, where Bill says to Mary, "I went home and told mother that the problem with her pot roast gravy was that she hadn't added three heaping teaspoons of olive oil." From the looks of these two, they're already either tripping acid or on heroin, but their friend, Jimmy, soon introduces Bill to someone who can get him something even better.
It's Jack, the local dealer, who invites kids up to his girlfriend's apartment and gives them free pot. Bill comes up with his friend and begins to light up his plain old tobacco-and-nicotine cigarette when a beautiful girl gives him one of her cigarettes. Soon Bill's giggling like a schoolgirl and dancing a frantic jitterbug. If REEFER MADNESS only serves one education purpose, it's as evidence that white people can't dance when they're stoned either.
Of course, after one joint, Bill's hooked. And, as his grades and tennis game go down the tubes, the principal can't help but notice. He comes right out and asks Bill, "Isn't it true that you have, perhaps unwillingly, acquired a certain harmful habit through association with certain undesirable people?" But Bill ducks the question and heads back to the solace of Jack's apartment, where any kid can go to be himself.
After one particularly potent reefer, Bill beds down with another girl. A concerned Mary tracks him down but gets the cigarette switch trick pulled on her. Soon she's giggling like a school girl while the weirdest of the potheads, Ralph, tries to jump her bones. When she resists and begins screaming, Bill comes running out, still under the influence of the evil weed. He begins hallucinating and blacking out at the same time Jack accidentally shoots Mary. The bullethole in her back is about the thickness of a pencil.
"Is she alright?" the other girl asks. "She's dead," Jack replies, pinning the blame on Bill, who ends up being convicted of murder. Only Ralph and the other girl know the truth, and they're locked up in Jack's apartment for the duration of the trial, with only a piano and couple hundred joints to keep them going. That's when the movie's funniest scene comes along, in which the girl, joint in mouth, begins playing the piano and a paranoid Ralph keeps yelling, "Faster! Faster!" until finally the girl is playing a frenzied solo, establishing the marijuana-music connection which would peak in the 60's.
The climax comes when Ralph kills Jack and the guilty piano girl blurts out the truth to the police. "I'm guilty, I'm guilty!" she cries as she signs her confession. Scarcely one minute later, as she is being led back to her cell by a prison matron, she runs down the hall and throws herself out the window, by which point most viewers of REEFER MADNESS have done the same. The only way to get anything out of this movie is stoned, with the video box serving as one giant rolling paper. But watch out because "the dread marijuana may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter... or yours... or YOURS!"
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