REVIEW: Reefer Madness, then and now (1936/2005 Showtime musical)

The 1936 anti-drug propaganda film Tell Your Children has become perhaps the most infamous, disreputable film in American cinematic history. That's a pretty significant achievement there. It's also nice that our most infamous film is this silly thing, rather than a real monument to evil like Triumph of the Will.

It's been re-marketed since 1972 as Reefer Madness, known by modern tens of millions- far more success and notoriety than it ever had in original release. Of course, now it is widely taken in exactly the opposite way from the anti-drug message as originally funded by silly religious backers. That is, it is now viewed as a prime example of anti-drug demagoguery. People now look at it as a study in how to push people's buttons.

Brushing past that, though, most modern viewers famously like to watch this while they are actually smoking "the weed from hell." A cheap $5 DVD will provide fine entertainment for stoner college boys for generations to come. Pass it down to your kids. Tell your children.

The most favorite scene for this is when the piano player at the malt shop sneaks off into the closet for a few hits. The crazed faces the guy makes are utterly priceless. Camp was absolutely not the intent of the creators, but this actor seems to be winking at us with the exaggerated expressions.

Bureau Official: Here is an example: A fifteen-year-old lad apprehended in the act of staging a holdup - fifteen years old and a marijuana addict. Here is a most tragic case.

Dr. Carroll: Yes. I remember. Just a young boy... under the influence of drugs... who killed his entire family with an axe.

Anyway, a couple of all American small town kids have a couple of hits of the reefer, and pretty soon they're drug addicted whores, and people are getting killed. One chick goes crazy with guilt in the end, and jumps out a courthouse window to her death. The climax involves one of the characters being drug into court, out of his mind, driven insane by the weed. He's sent off to the mental hospital for the rest of his natural life. Tell. Your. Children.

To say that this movie was ill conceived does not even get to the main point, which is the underlying artistic dishonesty. A movie can let you see things from someone else's point of view, but in this case it doesn't because you know damned good and well that the people who made this had to know better. It's hard to figure from watching this movie what the film makers really thought about any of this stuff.

Article Author: Al Barger

Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly Al Barger runs the still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at More Things. What with the paranoid religious visions, the Pentecostal music, visions of God and anarchy running amok and such, somebody …

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