There are lots of visual references to other movie musicals, and particularly counter-culture musicals. Echoes of Rocky Horror, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cabaret, and Chicago are all here for eagle-eyed musical fans. The movie is really rather spectacular, visually; costumes and sets are colorful and interesting. However, the prettiness is not enough to rescue the lack of a strong narrative structure, and things particularly seem to fall apart in the second act. Alan Cumming's character is used to frame the movie, a device which worked very well on stage, but only serves to slow down the story in the film version.
A lot of things are shuffled from the off-Broadway version - songs cut, the ending changed (not for the better, in my opinion.) The stage musical is engaging and lots of fun; but in this case what worked well when played broadly on stage doesn't come off as well on the small screen, where there is a greater expectation of realism. Suspension of disbelief is easier to come by in a small fringe theater; TV viewers are more likely more removed and more passive than their theater-going counterparts.
I finally decided that the reason this movie doesn't work is because a filmmaker can't intentionally do camp. For camp to succeed, on some level the creative team must be fully committed to the pathos, but this movie is never willing to stop winking at the audience, even for a second. It doesn't really aspire to anything other than high camp, but it's too self-aware to be truly campy, and so it ends up as pointless melodrama.
We can chalk this classic cautionary tale up as a cautionary tale for makers of movie musicals to come.
Further Reading:
- The lovely and talented Al Barger's Blogcritics review of Reefer Madness
- The Official Reefer Madness: The Musical web site
- More stuff by Matthew Poe at midnighthowl.com
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
Mr Poe, this was a good piece of writing, well thought out and explained.
Also, thanks for the recognition there.
Obviously I liked it better than you did. The songs qua songs weren't all that. They're not going to make you forget Rocky Horror. But still, they were halfway decent.
But mostly, it seems like you perhaps expected too much for a musical parody. It's not camp, which would be so bad it's good or something, but a satire of the old movie and the drug war. I think it did really well at that.
But you couldn't really expect the movie to be the starting place if someone just didn't know squat about the history of drug prohibition. Saying that it missed possible teaching moments is putting somewhat more of a burden on it than a movie musical could be expected to bear. Tell 'em to crack a danged book.
I mean, I didn't really learn a lot of hard facts about the historical conflict of cattlemen and ranchers from watching Oklahoma. Of course, that movie had the musical genius of "Poor Judd Is Dead."
I'll just say that I laughed MY ass off at this thing, and I wasn't even smoking.
2 - anna
hello :D
GOOD TEXT :)
i just wanna say that i would be fun to have the lyrics fore the songs on reefer medness.