Viking Night: Reefer Madness
By Bruce Hall
January 15, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But those savages don’t want you. No, they want your children - they want nothing less than to feast on the sweet, tender flesh of your progeny while you helplessly watch. And trust me, this threat cannot be bargained with. It cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse. And if you don’t take the drastic and immediate steps I tell you to, your entire way of life will be destroyed! What is this fiendish, soul-crushing instrument of total annihilation?
Marijuana! Arm yourselves! Hide your daughters! Sex-crazed pot fiends and their depraved, sinful, jazz music are coming!
Trust me, that's only half as melodramatic as the opening crawl for Reefer Madness (originally and way less awesomely called “Tell Your Children”), one of the best fear-mongering right wing indoctrination pieces you’ll ever live to see. It’s the work of a long forgotten church group, one determined to keep dope out of the hands of children. That’s not a bad thing, of course. The problem is that like most propaganda, it was made by people with little concern for realism.
In other words, Reefer Madness is an anti drug film - made by people who’ve clearly never ingested anything stronger than Christmas rum cake. And it is absolutely glorious.
The story is presented by the world’s greatest high school principal, Dr. Alfred Carroll (Josef Forte). He looks like Woodrow Wilson but sounds like Joseph McCarthy as he stands before a PTA meeting, bursting with fire and brimstone as the crowd gasps and whispers on cue. He spins a chilling yarn, wherein the innocent bloom of youth is snuffed out by the cravings of a few heedless, drug fueled maniacs.
It all starts with Bill and Jimmy (Kenneth Craig, Warren McCollum), two incredibly clean cut-looking teenagers who look like they’re on their way to share a milkshake. Jimmy says he's been invited by to an underground party by Blanche (Lillian Miles), a seductive classmate with a checkered past. Bill is reluctant to go, but Jimmy talks him into it. They arrive at a seedy apartment where Mae (Thelma White) and Jack (Carleton Young) live adulterously together, throwing wild sex parties and selling pot to teenagers. But unlike most drug dealers, they’re apparently not in it for the money.
They just think it’s just fun to sell drugs to kids.
Jack is the only drug dealer on earth without a car, so he talks Jimmy into giving him a ride to pick up more weed when Mae runs out. While driving, Jimmy smokes a joint and immediately goes insane. Grinning like a jackal, he gleefully runs down a pedestrian on the way to meet Jack’s dealer. Later, Jack promises not to talk to the cops, provided Jimmy keeps his mouth shut about Mae’s Underage Sex and Drug Emporium.
Poor Bill is still back there, wilting like a wallflower because he's not used to hanging out with drug fiends at their fiendish drug parties. Everywhere, people are smoking and laughing hysterically, crawling all over each other like dogs in heat. Blanche offers a joint to loosen him up, and it immediately turns him from a God fearing, church going paragon of virtue into...well...a dog in heat. He proceeds to get busy with Blanche - which is unfortunate because he’s already dating Mary - Jimmy’s sweet, innocent sister.
So of course Mary comes by, looking for her boys. She runs into Ralph (Dave O’Brien), a regular of Mae’s who has smoked so much weed that he has apparently turned into the Joker. While Mary impatiently waits, Ralph plies her with a joint, which immediately turns her into a giggling, demented lunatic. Ralph gets grabby, because that’s what happens to nice girls who use drugs. Bill tries to intervene but runs into trouble, because that’s what happens when you cheat on your girlfriend.
Are you picking up on the theme here?
The rest of the film (it's only an hour, but it's a long hour) has to do with the ramifications of all this and is full of stern looking judges, sweaty drug kingpins and hysterical 1930s women. There is also the heroic Dr. Alfred Carroll, world’s greatest high school principal, getting to the bottom of things by interrogating his students and sweet talking FBI agents out of classified drug files - because that’s the kind of raw, godlike power high school principals still had back in those days.
It’s hard to objectively comment on the quality of Reefer Madness. It's poorly shot, except for a handful of scenes. There’s definitely more sex and violence (or, what passes for it) than you’re probably used to seeing in a film of this era. Most of the music in the film exists only to suggest that everyone who listens to Jazz is on dope. But there’s a surprisingly effective visual effect near the end, when someone makes a dramatic decision out of guilt and shame. You should be laughing, but instead you just wince. And then you laugh.
But does any of that really matter? You can only watch this ironically, unless you’re the kind of person who never left your hometown, still drives an Oldsmobile and believes everything Fox News tells you to. Then you’ll probably take it pretty seriously. But this really has little to do with how you feel about “marihuana” (Reefer Madness favors the old-timey spelling) and more to do with the fact that whether you’ve ever been to a Phish concert or not, it’s easy to tell when someone’s blowing smoke at you. It might have had good intentions, but Reefer Madness stops just short of implying that one puff of weed will drive you to cannibalism.
Or even worse, premarital sex!
But in the same way hyperbole cheapens drama, it enhances comedy. And though intended as a drama, Reefer Madness succeeds as unintentional comedy thanks to its almost complete reliance on distortion. It’s clear that nobody involved with this movie had ever been within a hundred miles of either a drug or a drug dealer. But I can guarantee you that watching people smoke Reefer’s made up marijuana is a lot funnier than watching real people get stoned. It’s like listening to your Uncle’s bullshit fishing stories. You know it’s all lies, but you play along anyway because it’s the way he buys into it that makes it funny.
So I'll end by saying that Lillian Miles and Kenneth Craig actually aren’t half bad in Reefer Madness. Fish story or not, they’re really buying into it. Which is exactly what makes it funny.