Alice in Acidland

this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal (i.e. how the men have sex with their slacks on, which I do as well). the parties look like any other raging party in the 60's where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate having sex with everyone as soon as they walk in. i also want to compliment the editor on his jump cuts to build up the tension, very french new wave. i enjoyed the cut about a minute into the film where it cuts from one scene to another in the middle of a sentence but i have to say my favorite cut is during one of the many drawn out sex scenes, it suddenly cuts to a girl lying on the floor with no top, while all the men in the room are ignoring her and the voices over says something like "...lost her virginity." i don't normally rate movies so high, but this movie deserves to be on the top 250!

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.

The first part of this film is extraordinarily inept. It has a voice-over instead of dialogue, and tells the tale of a college girl who smokes marijuana and becomes a crazed lesbian. At the end of the film she drops acid and has a full-colour lesbian fantasy, that inevitably drives her insane. The wild lesbian fantasy is not too badly done, and requires extensive use of the pause button.

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.

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.