Alice in Acidland

Alice in Acidland is a waste of time. More than forty of the movie's sixty-seven minutes are spent building up to the point where Alice drops the LSD. These minutes can easily be spent with the vcr on fast-forward. There's little dialogue, but a lot of needless porn. It doesn't get much better once Alice drops the LSD and the film changes from black and white to color. About the only interesting thing about this film is noting the vocal lines that have been sampled by musicians.

Alice in Acidland (1969)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

How "entertained" you are by this 55-minute nudie will be determined by how badly you need to see nudity. Alice (Sheri Jackson) is taken to a pool party by her friend Frieda and it turns out that this party is being hosted by a lesbian. Not only is a lesbian hosting the party but she's serving up alcohol and weed, all of which are things that our young Alice has never tried. Soon the beautiful teen heads down the dangerous world of sex and drugs. Take out the nudity and ALICE IN ACIDLAND would be just like those exploitation pictures from the 1930s. Films like REEFER MADNESS, SEX MADNESS and THE COCAINE FIENDS are exactly what this movie is going for but of course the biggest difference is that this one here has wall-to-wall nudity. If you're just being released from an unknown country and haven't been able to get access to any sort of nudity then you might be entertained by this thing. All others are going to be bored out of their minds because outside the nudity there's really nothing going on here. Heck, even the nudity itself gets boring after a while even at just 55-minutes. The biggest problem is that there's really no sort of story going on here as we just get random scenes of people doing drugs or making out. The film's "story" is told via narration and this too gets very boring after a while. The title and poster art makes you think that you're getting into something wild but even by 1969 standards this thing is dull. The film's B&W images turn to color for the final ten-minutes but this doesn't add anything.

The college students Alice and Kathy are invited to a pool party by the lesbian Frieda. Alice gets drunk and uses acid and does not feel well. Frieda takes a bath with Alice and they have a lesbian relationship. Alice joins a group of hippies, uses acid and drugs with them and has sex with every man and woman in orgies.

"Alice in Acidland" is among the worse (if not the worst) films I have ever seen. This boring and annoying film is complete garbage, from the writer and director to the cast and crew. Poorly shot associated to bad acting, and even the naked women are not worthwhile watching since they are fat and flaccid "actresses". The exploitation is ridiculous, with the men wearing shorts while shagging the women. The message is trash, without scientific basis, and only a pretext for a cheap exploitation. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Alice na Terra dos Ácidos" ("Alice in Acidland")

Some say "Alice in Acidland" is a bad film, and while they're right--the pornography that comprises half to most of the picture is exceedingly dull and not particularly filmed well--in another sense, this is innovative filmmaking. It's as though someone found a silent stag film and decided to add two voiceover narrator tracts, one a cautionary tale from a supposed psychiatrist and the other from the Alice protagonist, along with minimal sound effects, to sell it as a self-contradictory narrative feature on the exploitation film circuit à la "Reefer Madness" (1936). A so-good-it's-bad tale that pretends to advocate and educate against the so-called evils of drugs and sex (including the lesbian variety, as depicted with copious amounts of nudity in this one), but, in fact, celebrates those very activities and can be quite laughable in the process. On top of all that, we get a final ten minutes of psychedelic art in color (as opposed to the rest of the picture's black and white) seemingly from a film student with access to an optical printer and the illicit substances the film warns us about. This is what cinema is all about: taking disparate materials and editing them together into something original and at least semi-coherent.

The "Alice in Wonderland" connection is a nice touch, too. The male narrator tells us this acid trip is no fairy tale, but here's a young woman named Alice going down the rabbit holes of drug and sex parties, led astray by the White Rabbit of her lesbian professor, meeting (and mating) a (sex) "animal," smoking as much as the hookah-fixated Caterpillar and otherwise ingesting as much as Lewis Carroll's Alice did magical mushrooms and other desserts, until the entire edifice crumbles like a deck of cards around her. No fairy tale for children, sure, but there's no pretending that drug and sex parties aren't the fantasies of every other mature viewer. Once again, the film tells us one thing, but shows us another.

Another really great Something Weird Video. Made 1968, Alice in Acidland is part LSD scare film and part psychidelic trip film. It's actually really swell. The first half that shows `Alice' as a naïve girl, who gets invited to a pool party. While there she gets drunk for the first time and then has a bath with the female host of the party. After that first encounter Alice becomes apart of that hip group. She frequents these orgy parties and meets Animal. The orgy scenes and the nudity are really tasteful and very pin-up like. At one party a new girl who wants to be apart of the group takes acid and then is raped by Animal. Alice takes acid afterwards, even though she was totally aware of what happened to her friend. After reflecting on the disturbing event that her friend suffered she trips hard. Much like Wizard of OZ, Alice in Acidland turns from black and white to full psychidelic color. There are a lot of super-imposed images of her friend and a lot of Alice dancing nude with patters and colors projected on her. I found the whole movie to be interesting to watch. The black and white half was shot well for the time and actually looks better than some later films. The tripping scene was very much like an opening sequence for a James Bond movie. It was traditionally psychidelic, not really intense like Psyched by the 4-D Witch. In the end a lesson is supposed to be learned. But who knows, it looked sort of fun.