Reefer Madness (DVD)

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How do you rate a film that's so bad everybody loves it? "Reefer Madness" from 1938 is probably the granddaddy of all so-bad-it's-good cult films. I'm not sure it started a welcome trend.

The movie really is awful, yet it's been around as a favorite of film buffs for as long as I can remember. Heck, it was already infamous when I was in high school in the late fifties, a film so appalling there was nothing to do but laugh at it.

It was produced by nobody (G & H Productions), directed by nobody (Louis Gasnier, who, in his defense, did a whole series of low-budget, B-grade exploitation pictures between 1905 and 1941), and starring nobody (unless you count Kenneth Craig, Dorothy Short, Warren McCullom, Dave O'Brien, Josef Forte, Carleton Young, or Thelma White as somebodies).

Originally released under the title "Tell Your Children," it was re-released as "The Burning Question," "Dope Addict," "Doped Youth," and "Love Madness" until it finally acquired its present appellation in 1947. It is, of course, as "Reefer Madness" that most of us have always known it.

The movie's forward probably says all that needs to be said. I quote in part: "The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible, otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful tale of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marihuana is that drug--a violent narcotic--an unspeakable scourge--the Real Public Enemy Number One!

Its first effect is sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter; then comes dangerous hallucinations--space expands--time slows down, almost stands still....fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances--followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions...leading finally to acts of shocking violence...ending often in incurable insanity." And so on.

The film is meant as a cautionary tale on the evils of smoking marijuana (alternatively spelled "marihuana" throughout the film), but it's so exaggerated, so totally, uncontrollably overstated, that one can only be amazed that it was made at all. Add to its preposterous plot some of the worst acting and most amateurish filmmaking seen this side of Edward D. Wood, Jr., and you get one really dreadful movie. Yet we know today that that's the point of watching it: To make fun of how dreadful it is. Which wouldn't be half so bad, in fact, if it wasn't a one-note wonder. Once we get the point that the film is inflating to ridiculous proportions the alleged dangers of pot smoking, and once we see how terrible the acting and sets are, there isn't much left to laugh at. In other words, the joke wears thin really fast, a lot faster than the movie's sixty-five minute running time. The first moments are silly and cute, to be sure, and there is a bizarre, sock 'em ending, it's true, but there's mostly a lot of tedium in between.

For the benefit of those who might actually be interested, the plot concerns a group of teens (played by actors in their mid-to-late twenties and looking older) who are lured into the sins of marijuana while frequently one of those dens of inequity, the local soda parlor. Once hooked on the diabolic dope, the teens turn to everything promised in the forward: promiscuous sex (implied), violence, murder, and complete insanity. Well, I'm sure you've already seen this chain of events occur among your own family and friends, so I don't need to remind you of the horrors the drug brings with it.