The Pace That Kills

If you've seen "Reefer Madness", you can skip "Cocaine Fiends/Pace That Kills". The same overblown scare tactics used in "Reefer Madness" are tried again here, but to limited success. At least "Madness" showed what marijuana looked like; cocaine is mentioned and abused but never actually shown. The same old plot of "good kids turned bad by dope" is re-hashed, but not as directly as in other films, so it gets talky when it shouldn't. The first taste of a drug apparently turns you into a monstrous irresponsible waste of humanity, or a "hop head" as the main character laments. Besides exaggerating consequences to the nth degree, "Fiends" has editing that makes you seasick. Characters simply vanish between film splices and cars appear out of nowhere. It's not funny, it's annoying. Although I'm not in favor of drug use at all, it's fun to see something subvert straightlaced black-and-white America. Anarchists will love this movie, but everyone else will find it rather dull.

Cocaine Fiends is one of the movies from the 1930's drugsploitation sub-genre. This, along with the superior Reefer Madness, simultaneously condemned and celebrated - intentionally or otherwise - the then taboo subject of drug abuse. Where Reefer Madness works as an unintentional comedy, Cocaine Fiends adopts a less overblown approach and, as a result, is liable to be much less entertaining to today's audiences. The production values are very low but the acting is OK. The story is exaggerated but there are no over-the-top scenes of drug-induced insanity. The film is best appreciated as a time capsule from the 1930s. It provides an insight into the attitudes of the time to drug use and its consequences. It does not, unfortunately, provide much in the way of laughs.

Also, the sound quality of the release I saw was was fairly horrendous. It was very hard at times working out what was being said. Ironically, this, coupled with the very flickery picture and deranged editing, produced the effect of watching the movie on drugs. But not very good drugs.

While on the run from the police in the countryside, small time city drug seller Nick meets an innocent country girl, Jane, who he easily wins over with his easy charm and magical headache cure (which Jane is unaware is cocaine). After several dates (and several hits) Jane moves to the city with Nick in order to get married and live the city high life. However, moving into a poor home in a bad neighbourhood, Jane hits bottom when Nick moves her out of the house and her need for drugs becomes increasingly desperate. With her mother worried as to her whereabouts, Jane's brother and his girlfriend try to find her – but even for them the world of illegal drugs has an overpowering and destructive influence.

Unlike many other viewers on this site, I did not deliberately turn to this film to have ironic laughs at it but more out of interest. I had seen clips of this film played in modern documentaries (Grass for example) and easily derided and, in fairness, it is easy to do because they are dated and rather corny but just to watch it with an agenda to mock it is to do the film (and yourself) a disservice. It is easy to forget that this was one of many attempts to control drug use in the 1930's, the Government turned to movies as part of trying to educate the public. Looking at it now of course, the film is pretty extreme in its depiction of the consequences but it is not as bad as others claim – it does show the good side of drugs, the feelings that it gives you etc but the consequences for every user will not be as extreme as this film tries to portray as the norm for even an one-time casual user; like Bill Hicks said 'never robbed nobody, never shot nobody, never lost one single job. Laughed my *ss off, and went about my day' (I'm paraphrasing).

In terms of its value as a film, it is of course pretty weak. The direction is OK but the production values are low even for the period; some shots are really badly lit, the film crackles and jumps around a lot due to frequent dropped frames and the soundtrack cuts in and out quite badly. The acting is also only average; it would be easy to criticise the actors for how quickly they take their characters from clean cut down to junkies but that is not their fault – they were only doing what they were told and I did think that they did do an OK job. Let's not forget that this is not a movie – it is an educational film and even today the production values and acting within educational films is still pretty dire; the last one I was a short film on confined space entry with William Shatner – hardly a piece of art!

I do think, despite retrospectively looking at it and seeing the way it over eggs the cake, that the film is a good try. It readily acknowledges the easy appeal of the drug (like it or not, many of us have tried drugs because they were available and, consequences or not, maybe have habits we never intended to) by showing how simple and fun it is to try once or twice as a casual thing. It also acknowledges the causes rather well – citing broken families, innocence and heck, just good old fashioned youthful rebellion and reckless abandon as reasons for getting into the scene in the first place; all reasons that apply today. I'm not going overboard on praise for this film but I think it is easy to laugh at it as a naïve, dated piece and just ignore the fact that it does have some good even if it does go to extremes in every case. It would have been better to show that drugs doesn't take every user to a moral low, some just do it as a occasional bit of fun but that, for some users, it does become an addiction and can lead to disease, moral decline, abuse and death, because for some this is the reality.

Overall, this is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but if you only watch it to get ironic laughs while you smoke some puff then you are not giving it a chance or meeting it on its own ground – that of the mid-thirties. The production is average at best – poor lighting, a poor script, simplistic characters and a real biased spin to the story, but it does have some good in it. It does acknowledge the appeal of the drugs (it doesn't paint those who chose to do drugs as morally deficient in any way) as well as showing an awareness of the deeper causation factors. Of course it is biased and goes to extremes in every case but it is not as bad as many say it is if you try to view it objectively and not just roar 'it's so bad it's good' within 2 minutes of starting it.

... and I think people are too quick to look at a camp classic like "Reefer Madness" that shows people smoking one joint and becoming, simultaneously, great piano players, sex fiends, and trigger happy, all while maniacally laughing and think that this film is like that one. You'd be wrong.

Alternatively titled "Cocaine Fiends", this is pretty realistic in showing the effects of cocaine on people and how the addiction is slow and subtle, creeping up on you until you are hooked. The bad guy is Nick, who, on the run from the police, ends up in a diner and gives the girl running it some "headache powders" for her headaches. He woos her with promises of marriage, and gets her to come to the big city with him. Today this all looks pretty obvious, but pre WWII, most people lived in rural environments and trusted one another. Needless to say, the girl gets none of her promises kept once she gets to the city, and is so addicted to cocaine she simply just can't leave.

In the meantime her brother is looking for her after she basically disappears with no letters back home, but he runs into a partying crowd and ends up addicted too.

There are the cheap rented rooms, women being driven to the oldest profession to survive, the flop houses where addicts get their fix and then recover, implied kidnapping and forced prostitution, and strangely enough a rich girl who keeps turning up in scenes who winds up having to do with a bigger story - the search for a "Mister Big" who is directing Nick and head of the drug and prostitution rackets. The story unwinds in an interesting and even pretty well acted way given I had never heard of any of the players. It must have been pretty hard dodging the censors and yet having a realistic story. Maybe that's why a rather contrived happy ending is tacked on to the end, although it seems out of place in the midst of all of the tragedy.

I'd recommend it. Just realize that I don't know of any good quality copies in circulation and the film "skips" so at times pieces of conversation are lost.

In the 1930's, a rash of "youth gone wild" films hit theatres and grindhouses across the U. S. These "cautionary tales" were really no more than cheap exploitation films marketed under the guise of advisory: don't let this happen to you or your children, and watch as they act like sex-crazed maniacs! Alluring, repulsive, campy, and downright horrible in equal measure, these films tried so hard and yet failed so spectacularly to be either entertaining to its target audience or informational, riddled as they were with sub-par talent and heinous misinformation. While the granddaddy of all of these is the now-classic "Reefer Madness", a few years before that came "The Pace That Kills", marketed today under the title "Cocaine Fiends."

Jane (Lois January) is a good country girl that helps Mother out in the local cafe. When fast-talking criminal Nick (Noel Madison) hides out in her diner, Jane is swept up in his life of big city crime and cocaine peddling with her first shot of Nick's special "headache powder". He convinces her to move to the city with him, where she quickly becomes a strung-out addict with no control over her life and renames herself "Lil". Also dragged into this malestrom of mobsters, molls, and white dust is Jane's naive brother Eddie (Dean Benton), his impressionable girlfriend, and a spoiled heiress. Crime, perversion, and youth gone "wild" abound!

Obviously, the idea of wild was much different 70 years ago. The most wild acts in the film -- including cocaine use, unmarried sex, and murder -- are shown off camera or only hinted at. In fact, the main hook of the film is largely absent from most of it. We're supposed to believe that because of cocaine, all of these characters are doomed, yet the drug itself only comes up a handful of times in the course of the picture. As for the "perversion", girls show no skin and the romantic relations between the characters lack anything resembling passion or chemistry. Compare this to "Reefer Madness", where several female characters were shown in states of undress and the targeted drug played a central role in the direct downfall of several of the characters.

The script is merely mediocre, and the acting is surprisingly adept, although given the context of the film, it doesn't take much to impress. Lois January is actually quite convincing as Jane/Lil, and toward the end of the film, when she gives in to her new persona, you believe the actress' pain. Dean Benton also has a few good moments, especially during a speech where Eddie realizes that he is, indeed, a "hophead." Where the film falters is pacing, structure, plot, and direction. Which, of course, means the foundation of the entire film is shaky at best. The last act veers wildly off its already worn tracks, and while it mostly avoids the fatalistic ending of "Reefer Madness", it also makes no sense in relation to the rest of the story. A good half of the subplots of the film are never resolved or brought together, and viewers will end up feeling cheated. And to feel cheated by "Cocaine Fiends" is a low that not even the finest "headache powder" will cure. The film tries desperately to blend drama, romance, musical, action, and crime into a whole and fails to produce anything resembling any of those.

Part of this may be due to the print itself. Although billed at 68 minutes here on the IMDB, the Alpha Home Video DVD print (which bills the film as "Cocaine Fiends" in a value-priced, stand-alone DVD) is only 60 minutes, and in at least half of the scenes, the film itself skips, leaving several lines of dialogue and explanation in a bloody heap on the cutting room floor. The sound is also horrendous, and Eddie's girlfriend seemed to go by any number of names due to the appalling lack of clarity in the audio track (I heard Betty, Fanny, Sandy, and a few others). In comparison, "Reefer Madness"'s print is in much better shape.

Although the film does have a few redeeming moments, and it's great for a laugh or for sampling into your latest electronica masterpiece, it's a pale shadow of "Reefer Madness", a standard by which it has no choice but to be judged against. Better to skip this one and go to the wild abandon to end all wild abandons. At least for 1930's youth. 3 out of 10.