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Second irony: I was not allowed to watch Cheech & Chong’s movies growing up. As I have oft referred to, pretty much everything that I brought home from the video store I was willing to watch with my parents - thank god Spanking the Monkey came out after I had headed off to college - and vice/versa. When I got to be a certain age, I was able to rent slasher films on my own but the Porky’s-esque sex comedies and filmography of the comedy duo were off-limits. As an adult, I can safely admit to myself that it was okay to do without them.

Up in Smoke, helmed by Adler (a music industry veteran also responsible for executive producing and/or directing fellow cult musicals The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment, and Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains) is an amiable lark built on a pleasing spirit and kinship with the punk movement, patched together with DIY gusto, and populated by characters and scenarios strung together from a fair sampling of Cheech and Chong’s comedy routines. It’s entertaining and cheerful and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Next Movie, by contrast, is one of the more slapdash efforts to ever get a wide release that I have had the displeasure of viewing. This is a film for which the phrase “you need to be stoned in order to appreciate it” could have been coined. The duo seem to be making it up as they go along, which would be fine if the improvisation built towards something (instead, it always seems to be pulling away from everything) and indulging in far more misogynistic and mean-spirited humor than their debut film.

The extended opening gag, involving convoluted efforts to siphon gas from a truck and transport it back to the tank of Cheech’s ride, spilling of said gasoline over the gentleman and the car during the transfer, and the subsequent (ill-advised) lighting up of a jay in the car find a balance between free-wheeledness and building to a payoff that the rest of the feature tries and tries again to aim for, but never finds the mark. (The timing and shot of the explosion of the car may be the most perfect thing in the film.)

There is no real plot, just a progression of digressions marked by entirely too much humor aimed at the pair’s snooty next door neighbor in the first half and not enough Cheech and Chong in the second half (Cheech is there but playing his Texas-twanged cousin Red instead, involved in an endless night of would-be debauchery with Chong). There are glimmers of what I think Chong wanted to achieve, in moments that are simultaneously teeth-grinding and unsettling - but not funny, to the sober eye - like a unsatisfying brew of Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Harmony Korine, but with the visual poetry those three are capable of achieving replaced with a televisual flatness.

In one endless sequence, the pair go to a welfare office to pick up their checks, and set off some mild anarchy up front, before heading to the back where Cheech gets busy with his girlfriend on the floor (unseen by us) while Chong sits in a chair surrounded on one side by a jovial but un-communicative wino, and on the other by a pre-Police Academy Michael Winslow, spewing sound effects and all. The scene continues past all point of purpose or reason to become oddly transfixing, if never enjoyable.

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