Tell Your Children

Oh my gosh, my post-war generation was still under the influence of this tripe and believed one puff would ruin a lifetime. No wonder the 60's generation talked about a credibility gap as they puffed away. This is a bad movie highlighted by the ridiculous, and no one in front of the camera or behind seems to care. Do the producers really believe this burlesque. Or maybe they're shilling for the liquor lobby then regaining its post-Prohibition popularity, or maybe the plastics lobby worried about the manufacturing possibilities of hemp oil.

In a way, it's too bad the movie comes across now as a joke. Pot may not be the Devil's brew, but it does dull awareness, and in that sense remains a risk. So hyping the effects has had a reverse effect that also needs to be considered. Nonetheless, the movie's smug authorities from school principal to courtroom judge to official narrator are enough to get me to light up and puff away. Plus they're not even good for a laugh.

Of the many scholastic films Ive seen in my time, this has to be the most hilarious piece of tripe ive ever seen. The setting is a small urban town, in the mid thirties. Everyones all happy, and everyone seems normal, that is, everyone BUT the shifty, shady, marijuana dealers who look just like *Gasp* you and me! They look so normal, lure your children into their home, and sell them exotic herbs from far away places! All whilst turning your children into sex maniacs, one puff hookers, and violent terrorists high on life (and that's not all!) Fun for the whole family (well...it all depends on your family...), this is a great flick, worth the watch! - "Two Green Thumbs Up!" Joe & Jay

Thelma White is the actress who really makes this anti-drug flick memorable. She portrays "Mae", who runs a drug den out of her late 30s apartment. Most of her scenes are shallow and brief but at the end she redeems herself in a memorable confession scene. The camera moves up close to catch her emotions and she really delivers when she says she didn't mean to hurt anybody to the DA. I don't know what happened to Thelma White before or after but she and the rest of the cast try valiantly to make this low-budget exploitation film work. "Reefer Madness" has become a joke movie--one everyone is expected to howl at and parody. That's unfortunate but understandable. I love to watch these roadshow exploitation movies from the 30s and early 40s and wonder about the fate of the cast and the crew, wonder about where they got their wardrobes and how were they hired? Was their a "Want Ad" in the Hollywood Reporter or did the film makers use their own friends, neighbors?

Well last night my friend and I smoked some of the demon weed and watched Reefer Madness. It was so obvious that it was made by people who had not only never been stoned, but had never even seen someone who was stoned. For a start the dancing in the apartment; Impossible! I couldn't move my legs. My friend and I figured out that the only way someone smoking dope could rob somewhere would be to go into a shop to buy munchies, pick up a banana and absent mindedly hold it like it was a gun, then get distracted by the sweets at the counter. When the cashier asked if they wanted anything else they stared at the sweets and said "Give me everything".

While I know from my own research that Cannabis has been linked, however tenuously, to certain mental problems so has sugar, coffee alcohol and television. But what I do know for certain is that while on dope you are incapable of hurting anybody else, even if they are hogging all the munchies.

I doubt that anyone still takes this movie seriously these days but it's funny seeing how people went paranoid about pot in the 30's. There are lots of wildly exaggerated or plain wrong comments and accusations in it. Best among them are that pot is more dangerous than Heroin, it will make you violent and eventually incurably insane.

The film details how smoking pot changes the lives of a couple of all-american teenagers. In fact, they're so clean cut, nice to their parents and just plain perfect that you're actually happy when their lives turn bad. On the way there we see some really funny overacting and the way that middle America thought people behaved after smoking pot. A single puff immediately has you in hysterics, after a couple of minutes it's down to pre-marital sex (hey, that's enough to get me hooked!), followed by a violent paranoia and finally of course, insanity.

The film is fairly standard propaganda stuff and follows the three important propaganda ingredients to a T. It's badly acted, exaggerated in hammering home a couple of points and frightening the uninformed about the fact that no one is safe from this great danger. It is however fairly lengthy for a propaganda movie and it's not as ridiculous as I expected. Although there are some really funny scenes that rightly make this a classic.