Government propaganda falling flat on its face and making people smoke more weed.
I’m well aware this isn’t a short, but I’m going to keep this one concise and bitter because I really don’t have much to say about this film. Besides, it’s goddamn propaganda, you don’t pay much heed to propaganda even if it completely fails to do what it set out to and had the polar opposite effect of its intentions. These government hygiene films are such easy targets because they’re seething with the shallow crookedness that you’d associate with an institution hell-bent on influencing what their people think and doing so in such a flagrantly obvious way that it makes for wonderful ironic enjoyment. I mean they’re absolute trash. Sublime trash.
Reefer Madness (1936) is one such example of failed propaganda, pumped out of the Hollywood machine to scare people away from the menace of pot. The film starts off with a title crawl so rotten and overripe that only the most naïve dupable audience would fall for its message, it makes smoking weed sound like huffing a battery acid-soaked rag. Out of an apartment repurposed as party central, a couple are getting people hooked on pot, giving them a space to smoke and dance and fuck freely, but once they start getting high school and college kids involved, things get a tad complicated, because we all know the kids are the salvation for our nation and we must protect them from all forms of corruption possible! So of course, these kids get high and get into all sorts of extreme trouble – the sort you’d only get into if you took a devilish cocktail of acid, cocaine, speed, ketamine, ether and just to take the edge off, some heroin – such as hit and runs, murder, suicide, rape and playing musical instruments like a god. The effects of weed are so hilariously inflated here that you can’t help but laugh, it parodies itself so I’m out of a job now.
I’m not going to judge it for its camerawork or the choppy way its edited, it was made by a church group and funded by the government, do you really expect it to storm the trenches on the film festival circuit? However, the narrative is set up in a rather interesting way, and by interesting, I mean a few paces anomalous from the norms of uninventive Hollywood filmmaking, the actual events of the film are sandwiched between the high school principal informing the parents of the pot pandemic, rather than throwing us head first into this goddamn zoo. Actually, in retrospect that isn’t much interesting so I take back what I said.
What you should be here to see is the stiff acting, it’s brilliant and I’ve seen decaying trees act better than this bunch. Their facial expressions are cheaply aggrandized and it feels like their eyes are about to pop out. Damn if that’s how people look like while high on pot then good thing, I stopped smoking because my face as it is isn’t doing me any favours.
This is most probably the very first stoner movie (do correct me if I’m wrong) and for the audiences of the time, I can imagine this was a riot to watch while high. For me personally, I found it quite boring, I was expecting things to get orders of magnitude more absurd, but that’s just my unrealistic expectations to blame. There’s plenty of better stoner films to watch, but if you happen to want to do dig to the very genesis of this topsy turvy genre, then this is probably where it all began.
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