Special Review: Reefer Madness

First, to my frequent readers, all seven of you, Thank you for your patience on the horror reviews.  I promise I will finish them by the end of January but a lot of things in life have made it tough for me to write.  So to try and keep the content going I figured I'd post this special review.  Those that didn't already know, I reside in Seattle Washington, and recently my state legalized marijuana.  As of the 6th of December, it is now legal to carry and use for the most part and thus I felt that I should honor the occasion with a review of one of the most infamous anti pot movies ever made,  Reefer Madness.
Reefer Madness is a rather interesting film, at least in social context.  It was made in the 30's and it features an insane amount of paranoia and propaganda that has made it infamous among the more versed in the stoic discipline of Bad Movie Watching.  Not to mention stoners that love to watch it ironically because, hey they're high and what else are they going to watch? (I'll come back to that.)
Originally titled Tell You Children, Madness was the brain child of a church group working to show the horrors of drug use, but was quickly picked up and re-edited for the exploitation circuit where it was basically forgotten until the 70's when it became an ironic "so bad it's good" cult classic.
All that back ground incidentally, is much more interesting than the movie.  I like to go into things like this open minded.  I knew going in the fact were going to be skewed, I knew that it was propaganda, I knew not to expect the best acting, or writing, or anything like that.  Hell I knew half the point of watching Reefer Madness the day pot was legalized in my state was to ironically look back at the past and see how far we've come in terms of culture, science and just how much public opinion can change given the years.  Historically, it's kind of like watching Birth of a Nation while studying the Civil Rights movement, right?
But that comparison ends when you remember that for all its numerous fault socially, Birth of a Nation is basically where a lot of the most essential techniques of editing and shot design came from, where as all Reefer Madness has going for it is just the context of a substance that was illegal at the time, but now legal to a degree.  It's more like watching Cocktail after prohibition was repelled if we want to be honest.  Seriously, this movie isn't bad because it's just from a less "enlightened" time.   This movie is bad because, and I know this is a shocker, it's bad.  The main problem is that it doesn't seem to have been written by someone that knew how structure worked.  It has too many characters, with too many motives, too many relationships and you never really know who's doing what, why and how everyone knows each other.  It's main narrative device is that the whole story is actually a flashback via a "true" story being shared by a public speaker against the menace of marihuana (yes that is how they spell it through out.)
The big problem is that the idea that all the bad things that are supposed to be the fault of people smoking pot (hit and run, murder, attempted rape, etc.) never really feel like that was why because the whole shift from good people to bad weed smokers is jarring and also so quick that you miss it if you blink and may have to rewind to just try and understand what's going on again.  The big third act twist happens in the form of an accidental shooting that the guilty party blame on the main (I think) character who thinks he's killed his girl friend because he smoked that evil evil grass and can't remember anything because he passed out and why oh why didn't he just stick to his good old fashioned cigarettes. (yes, it was back then.)  Of course this is all resolved by story's end because one of the guilt party can't live with themselves if the innocent party goes to jail and confesses the truth, but then the story ends and it comes back to this infamous clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqwwCvPtDhY

Yes, for the most part Reefer Madness is kind of a bore.  You might chalk this up to just my social context of weed being mostly seen as a harmless thing provided it isn't abused, or that the movie is propaganda, and both of those things are true, but at the same time the idea of this as some ironic classic baffles me.  It's not it isn't easy to make fun of, or that its acting "talent" isn't laughable, I just found it incredibly boring.  Those of you that like to watch the movie while smoking and making fun of it should feel proud to do so in your small act of retroactive social defiance, but if I'm smoking some of what is now a legal substance, I'm sticking to these:

-Pink Floyd The Wall (though it's not a requirement despite popular opinion, but still great.)
-Abbott and Costello (don't ask me to pick, you pick one.)
-Star Trek The Original Series.
-Gremlins 2
-Dune (the theatrical film.)
-Godzilla movies
-Fantasia
-The Fall
or hell even things like:
-Die Hard
-Commando
-Kung Fu Hustle