Deliverance (1972)

This whole movie definitely illustrates one unshakable principle: never go to the South for any reason.
-Crow T. Robot

The "Deep South" trope, as I'm sure you recall, paints a rather uncultured picture of the southeastern portion of the United States as a largely rural area populated entirely by rednecks, Southern belles, Daisy Dukes, grizzled old moonshiners, fat corrupt sheriffs, Colonel Sanders lookalikes, and people who would string you up if you ever told them the Union won the War Between the States. Everybody's inbred, everybody's illiterate, everybody carries a shotgun, everybody is suspicious of folk who "ain't from 'round here," and everybody who isn't either deeply Christian or secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan is a psychopath who will carve you up with a chainsaw should you ever cross their path.

Of course, life doesn't always imitate art, so it would be wrong to assume that people from the South are all actually like this. But every time you watch a movie or a TV show and hear someone end a sentence with "y'all", this is where you usually end up.

Out of all the movies we've done, none of them really do much of anything to set themselves apart from this stereotype. Road House gave us a cavalcade of drunken rednecks in Missouri AND a Larry the Cable Guy clone. Texas Chain Saw Massacre...well, clue's in the title, really. And then of course we have The Giant Spider Invasion, which didn't even take place in the South. And beyond the blog, there's Smokey and the Bandit, The Dukes of Hazzard, and a number of Family Guy episodes among other examples.

And then we come to Deliverance, a 1972 suspense flick that has come to claim the unenviable title of THE ULTIMATE DEEP SOUTH MOVIE.

That was, ironically, based on a book written by someone who was living in Georgia at the time.

Basically, when one thinks of Deliverance, there are one or both of two scenes that pop into people's minds. I'm sure you already know which scenes I'm talking about, and we'll get to them in due time.

First we must establish the plot of the film, in which four city boy friends from Atlanta (played by Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall) decide to take a seemingly uneventful weekend canoe trip down the fictitious Cahulawassee river valley for one last look at the scenery before a hydroelectric dam is built that will leave the area flooded.

Our first glimpse of hillbilly country is a gas station which looks like a rundown shack with a non-functioning rust-eaten car in front of it. Here we come to the first memorable scene from the film, in which the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall pulls out a guitar and performs the famous melody "Dueling Banjos" with a banjo-plucking local boy who doesn't see fit to shake his hand afterward.

"I'm not allowed to play with you anymore unless y'all pay for another five minutes."

After hiring two other bumpkins who happen to own a garage to drive their cars out to their finishing point in Aintry to be picked up on Sunday, Burt Reynolds refuses to let them show him where the river is, fixing instead to just drive around aimlessly through the woods since he is quite certain that he knows so well where it is. Eventually they find it, pull their canoes out and go for a little downstream paddlin', passing underneath a bridge where our young banjo-player from earlier watches them. During the ensuing sequence of outdoor activity, Burt Reynolds establishes his character as a stoic outdoorsy type, hailing the life of a rugged nature boy over living as a suburbanite coddled by the conveniences of modern technology and predicting that the machines will one day fail and man will return to the woods in some reverse-Terminator fantasy of his.

Completely ignoring the existence of toilets, lasers and advanced medical science that have helped people live longer lives and make things work more efficiently with less environmental impact. But whatever, if you want to go back to a time where most people lived in huts, never brushed their teeth, and didn't live past their 30s. And I can only assume that one of these modern conveniences you seem to resent so much just happens to be maps.

Meanwhile, your teeth are falling out, you've got lice in your hair, and the lack of bathing begins to show.

The next morning, during another of their canoe trips, John Voight and Ned Beatty get separated from Burt Reynolds and the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall and end up down a different part of the river, where they make a pit stop and come across two other friendly-looking locals. Who proceed to walk them further into the woods at gunpoint, tie Jon Voight to a tree, and force Ned Beatty to strip naked and...

Well, right about now you may have guessed that we've reached the other most memorable scene in the film. The infamous "squeal like a pig" scene. This is a PG-13 review of an R-rated movie, and I'm not especially comfortable describing a rape scene with the writing style I employ, so I'll just drop a hopefully somewhat tasteful picture with a humorous caption here and leave the rest up to your vivid imaginations.

"Now y'all are in a largely con-servative state, and this kinda thing is usually frowned on 'round these parts, but when y'all been livin' in these here woods fer as long as we have with very little contact with tha outside world, and mos' wimmin findja repulsive anyways...well, ya kinda stop carin' whur ya git it from next."

Thankfully before Jon Voight suffers a similar fate, Burt Reynolds shows up and pierces one of them with his bow and arrow, promptly chasing the other off.

The foursome then spend the next few minutes of the film debating the legality of their situation--whether a jury of the man's relatives (his mother, his aunt, or providing they're not one and the same, his father and uncle) would see such an act as justifiable homicide and considering that the imminent and suddenly convenient damming of the valley will get rid of the evidence - before finally deciding to give the corpse a proper burial. Then, realizing that the mountain people are easily startled but will soon be back and in greater numbers, they decide to get in their canoes and amscray.

Besides, are these the faces of an impartial jury?

During this hasty retreat, the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall forgets to put on his life jacket and for some reason falls out of the boat into the river (later assumed to have been shot, perhaps by one of the deceased's vengeful toothless companion - suffice to say, he is not seen for most of the remainder of the film) as the boys encounter some rapids that tear one of their canoes to pieces and drops them in a basin, while Burt Reynolds breaks his leg, and about now should be considering recanting his anti-technology speech.

You know, lakes are underrated, really. They're pretty to look at, no noisy raging currents, you can swim in them, they're perfect for water-skiing...

No shattered coccyx.

Believing the other inbred toothless hick to be lurking around nearby just biding his time, and since Burt Reynolds can't be moved, novice sportsman Jon Voight is picked to avenge the death of the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall. Climbing to the top of a rock face with Burt Reynolds' bow and arrow and staying there until daybreak, Jon Voight finds someone with a rifle looking down into the gorge and, not sure if this is the same guy who ran away from them, but probably believing all these unwashed, uncivilized rednecks to look and smell alike anyway, Jon Voight somehow manages to off the poor bastard with a clumsily-fired arrow through the chest. And only afterward does he realize that it may or may not be that guy. After coming back down the cliff with their fresh kill, they tie up the body with rocks and let him sink to the bottom of the river, as they do the mangled corpse of the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall after finding him washed up on a nearby rapid.

In Aintry, Burt Reynolds is sent to a hospital while Jon Voight and Ned Beatty are left to work out a plausible story to cover up a potential double homicide charge and explain the fact that one of their party is missing. (To make matters worse, the deputy's brother-in-law is reportedly missing.) The sheriff, being one of those fat beady-eyed authority figures who's probably the Boss Hogg bribing type, is skeptical of their story, but since they have no evidence to hold them on, simply tells them to "go back where y'all came from." And thus the survivors of this canoe trip from hell will take these memories to their graves, secure in the knowledge whatever evidence remains will soon reside at the bottom of a dammed-up lake and Jon Voight relives the trauma in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

Someday you'll look back on this and laugh.

As a suspense story, Deliverance does its job well. A group of city slickers who come out to the country for a peaceful retreat and find themselves out of their element when things take a wrong turn, whereas Burt Reynolds, who earlier in the film comments that technology will fail, the system will break down and man will revert back to his primal stage, suddenly given a taste of the world without creature comforts and finding himself coming out the worse for wear. The scenery is very beautiful and the setting is quite picturesque, but within these thick forests hide the gunmen and rapists. Also, certain parts of the film are left deliberately vague. What really killed the bad guy from Robocop and Total Recall? Was that really the other mountain man Jon Voight arrow'd at the top of the cliff? What DID happen to that one giy's brother-in-law? You don't know. And the movie's certainly not going to tell you. To be perfectly honest, I don't think the movie knows either.

It's just a shame that the main thing that this movie is remembered for is casting a stereotypical light on the population of the Southern states and the Appalachian mountains, who already live in one of the poorest regions of the continental United States with about a third of its residents living below the poverty line, a high unemployment rate, low per capita income and little job availability, where education and living wages lag behind the rest of the country, and where you have a history of economic inequality, lack of infrastructure and political disillusionment.

And to think, the people the author based the original book on were actually quite nice.

Jimmy?

Mazes and Monsters (1982)

Rik:
Hey, wouldn't it be amazing if all this money was real?
Vyvyan:
That is the single most predictable and BORING thing that anyone could ever say whilst playing Monopoly.
--The Young Ones, "Boring"

It seems like every time there's a national tragedy on the news like a school shooting, there's always some half-crazed, loudmouthed politician who is quick to blame violent TV shows and video games for corrupting the minds of our children and encouraging them to pick up a gun and blow someone's head off.

Back in the 70's, rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Styx and ELO were often accused of hiding backwards Satanic messages in their music.

Every once in a while a kid gets a hold of a library book that their lazy parents wouldn't want them looking at and then it's cries of "take this book off the shelves children shouldn't be reading this."

And of course, J. K. Rowling got an earful when ultra-conservative Americans started thinking that the Harry Potter books were a gateway to Satanism.

Apparently there are so many ways to screw up children these days.

It was the same with RPGs in the 1980s--misinformed parents back then thought games like Dungeons and Dragons would have their kids joining a cult or something.

Mazes and Monsters is a 1982 CBS made-for-TV movie based on a novel of the same name by author Rona Jaffe, which was among other similarly-themed works based off the real-life disappearance of one James D. Egbert III, a child prodigy and computer science student at Michigan State University. On August 15, 1979, Egbert disappeared from his dorm room and entered into the steam tunnels below campus in the first of several attempts to kill himself (he eventually did in 1980). Although at the time he was suffering from depression, stress and an addiction to drugs, initial investigations into his disappearance led to the misconception that his hobby of tabletop role-playing games was the cause, and of course the media took it and ran with it.

Thankfully, in these enlightened times, nobody of sound mind believes that playing RPGs leads to violence and suicide. These days we just assume that people who play them are fat, pasty-faced nerds with thick glasses, pale skin and high sugar intake who will probably die having never known the touch of a woman.

The paranoia is gone, but the negativity sadly persists.

"Obvious exits are north, south and Dennis. Also, you can't get ye flask."

So the movie begins with a police investigation at the entrance of a cave somewhere. An on-the-spot reporter explains to us all that whatever led to this sad, sordid state of affairs began with a seemingly innocent (which it probably was) Mazes and Monsters game played by a group of students at the fictitious Grant University.

Let's meet our foursome:

Chris Makepeace from Meatballs plays JayJay, a genius who skipped to college straight from high school. He acts like a clown at parties because he gets lonely and wants people to notice him. He also has a pet mynah bird, a mother who constantly redecorates his bedroom every time his back is turned, and an odd fixation with hats. (Seriously, he wears a different hat in every scene--kaiser helmet, cowboy hat, pilot's helmet, safari hat, Sherlock Holmes hat, construction worker's hard hat...)

Wendy Crewson, who would play the First Lady in Air Force One, is Kate, a brainy girl with a history of bad relationships, which she attributes to being too smart for the boys she meets. She wants to be a writer.

David Wallace plays Daniel, a boy for whom his parents have very high expectations. He wants to go to Grant U and make video games for a living, but his parents would prefer he go to MIT and get one of those big hi-tech jobs.

Your enablers, ladies and gentlemen.

And last but not least, in his first starring role fresh off his engagement with Bosom Buddies, Tom Hanks takes the lead role as Robbie, a former Mazes and Monsters player whose obsession with the game saw him flunk out of his old school. His mother drinks, his father is strict, they often get into fights, and years ago his older brother Hall, who had entertained thoughts about running away to New York City when they were kids, disappeared without a trace.

The foursome inevitably meets on their first day of college, and when they hear Robbie used to play M&M, they invite him to join them and complete their foursome. He refuses at first, saying that he's only here to study, but eventually caves to peer pressure.

He should be reading Shakespeare. He's a SWELL author.

For the next few scenes I begin to question if Robbie actually had an obsession with Mazes & Monsters in the first place. We see him playing the game perfectly normal-like and alternately going outside, studying and starting up a relationship with Kate. What part of this screams "tabletop RPG addict"? It looks to me like it's just another harmless hobby which he partakes in moderate, healthy doses while living a perfectly normal life outside the game. And they're telling me it made him flunk out of college?

In fact the only person I AM genuinely concerned with is JayJay, who suddenly feels lonely when Daniel has a test to study for and Robbie and Kate are having a moment together.

In fact, he feels so lonely he is contemplating suicide. Maybe THEN people would notice him. And maybe people would notice him more if he killed himself in the abandoned caves near campus.

Luckily, he has a change of heart when he discovers that the caves would make the perfect place for a kick-ass LIVE ACTION round of Mazes and Monsters. So with a little convincing, his friends agree and they have one.

The early Judean People's Front on their first raid.

It is at this point where Robbie, who up to now has been a perfectly rational human being, FINALLY begins to lapse. While they are in the caves, the party becomes separated and Robbie for some reason begins to hallucinate that a monster from the game is standing right in front of him. Which in his subsequent freak out he proceeds to slay.

From then on, Robbie continues to speak in character as Pardieu the holy man, plus to add to Robbie's recurring dreams about his missing brother he now sees a strange magical guy who urges him to go on a quest to find "The Two Towers" and reach "The Great Hall" who convinces him to spend all day in his dorm room drawing maps, break up with Kate to maintain his celibacy, and finally walk out of JayJay's Halloween dorm party without returning to his dorm room.

After a while Robbie appears to have dropped off the face of the earth, and his friends get worried, especially after inspecting his bedroom and finding the very nicely drawn maps in his room. They call the police and manage to report Robbie's disappearance to Detective Mayor-of-Amity-from-Jaws while keeping their real life RPG game in the cave a secret from him, which takes us back to the police investigation at the beginning of the film to let us know all that we've finally come full circle. Eventually, Robbie's confidence in Kate suddenly makes everything clear - he has wandered into New York City and plans to jump off one of the Two Towers, i.e. one of the World Trade Center buildings, so he can reunite with The Great Hall, i.e. his brother.

Right about now would probably be a good opportunity for a Lord of the Rings joke, but I'm not all that interested in Tolkien, so I don't really know any good ones.

By the time Robbie's friends make it to NYC and set up headquarters in JayJay's re-re-re-re-refurbished bedroom, Robbie has already reached the next stage of addiction--acts of shocking violence--by knifing a mugger in an alley under one of his hallucinations.

See, this is what Dungeons and Dragons does to you! It starts with one or two harmless games, then you get hooked! Next thing you know you start LARPing and talking in character, and then come the fixed ideas, the monstrous extravagances and emotional disturbances...you can't direct your thoughts...space expands, time slows down...you're unable to resist physical emotions! Next thing you know you're lying in a gutter with 20-sided dice up your nose murmuring about elves and hobbits and orcs and damage points! It's a worse drug than H. P. Lovecraft novels, Transformers and Magic: The Gathering COMBINED!

Anyway so as not to mince words, they manage to catch Robbie and snap him out of his reverie just as he's about to leap from the observation deck.

Three months later, Kate (now writing her novel about the four of them playing the game), JayJay (now in the director's program of the theater arts department) and Daniel (who I'm sure is...doing...stuff) pay Robbie a visit at his parents' house. Robbie, having reached the final stage of addiction--INCURABLE INSANITY--is now living peacefully in what he is convinced is an inn, his payment for room and board in the form of a "magic coin" that reappears at his bedside every morning, though he is undergoing therapy. His friends, secretly lamenting that the Robbie they knew and loved is no longer here, join him on one last Mazes and Monsters game.

"Gimme all your gold, your EXP and any items you might have or I'll kill you and take them off your dead body!"

Okay, here is my view of this issue:

There is nothing wrong with escapism. In moderate, healthy doses, a little getaway from reality every now and then is a good thing. It's especially true for teenagers--kids are a cocktail of emotions in their adolescent years, and while sources of ethics, morals and guidance are important, having an outlet for their aggression that doesn't hurt themselves or anybody else can be beneficial to their development. Besides, we already have V-chips, content ratings and responsible parenting; if we just go and regulate the crap out of everything free speech protects just because it MIGHT drive someone to commit acts of violence, that's just censorship. If you take Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft or any other pastime too seriously, outside of the simple hobbies that they are, then the problem isn't with the games, it's with YOU.

This is the message I CHOSE to derive from this movie. Robbie's descent into fantasy-induced madness was because of unresolved emotions after his brother's disappearance, not because of some silly game like Mazes and Monsters. His mother even tells us herself at the end of the film--he was already emotionally fragile, and the game was just an outlet. His friends are also examples--they all had issues, they played the game to escape reality, they knew it was just a game, and they all move on to bigger and better things. (If anything, I was more concerned with JayJay's hat fixation. Where is he GETTING them all?)

And Robbie too will move on to bigger and better things. Things like Apollo 13, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and the Toy Story movies.

Good thing too, because this movie is flat out ridiculous. Learning about the possible dangers of role-playing games from a film like Mazes and Monsters would be like watching Reefer Madness for its anti-drug message. An outdated product of a thankfully bygone media circus.

"Okay, but we can't stay too long. We've got an anime club meeting tonight."

First Blood (1982)

NOTHING IS OVER! NOTHING! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't MY war! You asked ME, I didn't ask YOU! And I did what I had to do to WIN! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting, calling me "baby-killer" and all kinds of vile crap! Who are THEY to protest me! Who are THEY! Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about!

Yes, this is the first Rambo movie.

No, it wasn't called "Rambo". You're thinking of that 2008 film. They didn't start putting his name in the title until the first sequel.

Based on the 1972 novel written by Canadian-American author David Morell and starring Sylvester Stallone in the role that made him an action star, when not a plucky prizefighter from Philadelphia, First Blood was the first of several movies featuring everyone's favorite one-man army, John Rambo.

This movie differs greatly from the Rambo films that came after it by the fact that its body count is significantly smaller--in fact, only one guy dies in its entire 97-minute running time. There is plenty of the gun play and explosions that the franchise would become known for, certainly, but compared to its sequels it is noticeably tamer. Ironically, you can thank Stallone himself for that--his other multi-picture franchise made him enough of a star to give him some influence on the film's screenplay, and it was his idea to deviate from the original novel and have Rambo leave his pursuers alive to make him more sympathetic. The filmmakers also shot a different ending in which Rambo commits suicide, as in the novel, but scrapped it when it proved too depressing for test audiences.

The film was a hit with critics and audiences, so in 1985, Rambo: First Blood Part II came out, in which Sly Stallone reprises his role from the first film, this time searching for American POWs in the Vietnamese jungles, but more importantly perforating ex-Viet Cong soldiers and joining the ranks of Chuck Norris, G.I. Joe and the kids from Red Dawn in the gratuitously violent fight against Communists or Communist-type enemies. The sequel wasn't so much a post-mortem on the Vietnam War as it was a complete do-over, as were other Vietnam or Cold War-related films of the time.

How did this happen? How did Rambo go from a shell-shocked veteran to the rampaging Commie killer we know so well? How does a franchise go from lamenting the ravages of war to glorifying them?

I have a theory that Ronald Reagan becoming President might have had something to do with it.

A lesser known Oregon blue law: it is illegal to ask for directions to the nearest restaurant.

John Rambo, for those who aren't familiar, is a veteran of the Vietnam War. In combat he was a hero, a Green Beret and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. (Impressive for the man who would direct a sequel to Saturday Night Fever one year later.) He could fly a gunship, could drive a tank, he was in charge of multi-million dollar equipment. Nowadays, he's just a rambler visiting his old war buddies in the British Columbian Oregonian mountains. One day he happens across a quaint little hamlet looking for a bite to eat when Sheriff Will Teasel (Brian Dennehy) spots the American flag patch on his jacket and does him a favor by driving him clear to the other side of town, all while making it known to him in not so subtle terms that he "don't take kindly to his type 'round these parts." He drops him off outside of city limits in hopes that he'll take his recommendation of a diner 30 miles up the road, but when he notices him walking back towards town he about faces and slaps some cuffs on him on charges of vagrancy and, after finding a very large knife which Rambo fails to convince him he uses for hunting, carrying a concealed weapon.

Rambo is brought to the station and handed over to Deputy Sergeant Arthur Galt (Jack Starrett) to prepare him for trial the next day, which includes a rigorous interrogation, fingerprinting, and spraying him with a high-pressure hose, despite one of Galt's subordinates remarking on some nasty scars on Rambo's back which Galt pays no attention to. They are just about to dry shave him when a Vietnam flashback causes him to run wild, beat down policeman after policeman on his way out of the station, hijack a motorcycle and ride off into the woods somewhere with Teasel in hot pursuit. After he loses his prey at a riverbed, he calls for reinforcements, including hunting dogs and a chopper, to hunt him down.

Hide and seek was always Galt's favorite game.

Rambo is chased to the edge of a tall cliff complete with waterfall where he jumps onto a tall tree as Galt rides in on the chopper and starts taking shots at him with a rifle, oblivious to Teasel on the radio ordering him to stop shooting and a thermal draft rocking him up and down. In self defense, Rambo chucks a rock at the helicopter, causing it to pitch and throw Galt out to become the only human fatality in the entire movie. Teasel appears, gets the wrong impression, and is suddenly filled with an impulsive urge of vengeance, refusing to acknowledge that he and his inexperienced team of deputies are in way over their heads, especially when Rambo begins non-fatally snaring them one at a time with makeshift booby traps and guerrilla tactics and then holds Teasel to a tree at knife-point, warning him to leave him alone.

The state police is brought in for assistance, followed by Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), Rambo's superior officer in Vietnam, whose advice to let Rambo go and put out an APB falls on the prideful Teasel's deaf ears. Throughout the movie. Your funeral, dude.

"I told you I use this knife for hunting."

Trautman makes radio contact with Rambo and attempts to reason with him while Teasel and company get a lock on his current position. Some rookie National Guardsmen corner Rambo in a mine entrance, and fire is exchanged before one of them launch a rocket at him which caves in the entrance and traps Rambo inside, where everyone presumes he is dead. But in a not entirely all that shocking turn of events, Rambo wades through rats and standing water and manages to escape the mine through a shaft to the surface, after which he hijacks an army truck and uses the explosives in the back to blow up a gas station back in town.

The final scene has Teasel on the roof of the police station with a shotgun waffling back and forth as Rambo incinerates a hunting rifle shop and shoots in store windows. He then enters the station and blasts Teasel off the roof through a skylight, and is just about to finish him off when Trautman arrives and notifies him of the state police and army personnel surrounding the building and ready to blow his head off...which leads into Rambo's famous monologue about how nobody respects him and how difficult it is for him to go back to a civilian life after returning from an unpopular war. He then recalls the dying agonies of a friend who had been killed by a bomb in a child's shoeshine box before collapsing in tears in Trautman's arms and finally turning himself in.

"Where did my contacts fall out?"

First Blood is a fascinating movie. Fascinating in that it's a tense action story about a PTSD-ridden war veteran pushed over the edge, which Stallone plays well, but also in that it is a mostly casualty-free film which would lead off an increasingly violent movie franchise, which poses to me a question: how exactly did this character go from a man who was traumatized and horrified by the ugliness of war to the ruthless killing machine we know today? If war horrified this man so much that he keeps flashing back to bad memories during his army days, then why does he go back to that very thing in the next three movies? In his closing monologue, he stated that he was tired of people demonizing him to the point where he couldn't live a normal life. So what, he was so fed up with being called a ruthless killer that he decided to go back to southeast Asia and BECOME a ruthless killer, as if to say "HERE!! I'M A RUTHLESS KILLER!! HAPPY NOW!?"

First Blood shows us that Rambo should be pitied as well as feared. War is apparently all he knows how to do, and every time he tries to get out, they keep pulling him back in. And they've kept pulling him back in for three decades now. He has become the very thing he spent this whole time hiking in the Northwest being accused of.

So...are you all happy now?

Hate the game, not the player.

Reefer Madness (1936)

"The next tragedy may be that of your daughter...or your son...or yours...or yours...or YOURS!"

Climb inside the DeLorean and fasten your seat belts, kids. We're going WAAAAAAAAY back for this one.

The year is 1936. It has been two years since the adoption of the Hays Code, a moral guideline to what could and could not be shown in movies. You couldn't swear, you couldn't drink, you couldn't make fun of religion, you couldn't kill anybody (at least not realistically), you couldn't even TALK about marital infidelities...unless you were a bad guy, in which case the Code dictated that you would be killed off every time. You couldn't even root for the bad guy. It would be another two decades before the Code's iron-clad reign came to an end and standards would start to loosen, and another three before the MPAA would start playing around with a ratings system.

You're a 1930s filmmaker. You think the Hays Code sucks and you want to put things in your movie which the powers that be would frown upon, but most studios would censor it for fear that the government or other authorities would censor it for them. How do you get past this hurdle?

The answer is simple: MAKE IT EDUCATIONAL.

Reefer Madness is one of many films of the 30s and 40s released in the exploitation circuit, which got around the Hays Code by claiming to be cautionary tales about the dangers of drugs and premarital sex, because as you've probably already figured out, you couldn't talk about drugs, much less show them, in movies of the time. Its origins to this day are disputed - some say that it was a church-funded project meant to educate parents about the dangers of cannabis; a rumor spread during the 70s that the FBI financed the movie; while suing a distribution company over the film rights, its producer Dwain Esper made claims that he produced it for the Army, which were disproved. But whatever the intention, it fails as an educational film because when you base it on what we know now of its effects on the human body, it doesn't quite get its facts straight.

"You should read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet! It's swell!"...dork.

The film centers on Bill Harper (Kenneth Craig), an average 1930s American high school student who enjoys typical 1930s American high school student things like tennis, Shakespeare and using the word "swell" as an adjective. We also see two dope dealers Mae and Jack (Thelma White and Carleton Young) whose target clientele is teenagers like Bill, although Mae has a guilty conscience about it. Helping them are college dropout Ralph (Dave O'Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles). One day Ralph and Blanche invite Bill and his friend Jimmy (Warren McCollum) to a party where the demon drug is passed around freely. When Jack runs out of reefer, Jimmy offers to drive him to his supplier to pick up some more, and by then is so stoned out of his gourd that he runs down a pedestrian at a crosswalk on the trip back.

"I wish my brother George were here..."

The newly addicted Bill starts having an affair with Blanche, and his disappearances at school as well as Jimmy's behavior has Mary (Bill's girlfriend and Jimmy's sister, played by Dorothy Short) worried. She goes to Ralph and Blanche's place to try and find Bill, and while there Ralph slips her a joint which she mistakes for a normal cigarette and then attempts to ravish her. Bill enters the room after a quick one with Blanche, imagines in a drug-induced haze that Mary is stripping for Ralph and attacks him. Jack attempts to break them up by hitting Bill with a gun, but Bill fights back and in the struggle the gun is accidentally fired. Despite the fact that the gun was CLEARLY POINTED AT THE FLOOR when it went off, Mary is killed.

The next thing Bill knows, he's on trial for first-degree murder, where his high school principal Dr. Carroll (Joseph Forte, whose character also appears as the speaker at a PTA meeting which serves as a framing device for the film) testifies. After several minutes of deliberation and light switches visualized as hangman's nooses, the jury eventually finds him guilty. Ralph, Mae and Blanche are holed up in an apartment during the trial, during which Ralph starts going insane and grows desperate to confess that Jack was the one who killed Mary. Jack is ordered to kill Ralph before he hears the verdict, but Ralph gets the drop on him and beats him to death with a stick. A neighbor hears the noise and calls the police, and everyone is almost immediately arrested.

We then get a montage of Mae's police interrogation and scenes of cops raiding the entire drug ring which ends on Blanche tearfully admitting Bill's innocence. She is to be held as a material witness for Ralph's impending trial, but as she is led out by a matron, the guilt is so heavy for her to bear that she throws a fully-dressed mannequin out of a nearby window to her death. Bill is brought back before the judge, who overturns the verdict, declares him a free man and orders him to remain for Ralph's trial...which doesn't last very long, as Ralph's defense counsel drags him in the courtroom and requests that he be institutionalized for the rest of his natural life.

These shots alone would scare you off drugs for life.

Rather than dive straight into the film's camp value, I will choose instead to go over the many things which it claims to be telltale signs that you or someone you love is addicted to marijuana. Naturally, people who use it shouldn't drive automobiles, so I'll give them that one, but there are plenty of other so-called symptoms:

• Uncontrollable laughter. We see Ralph sitting in his chair with a joint in his hand, occasionally letting out a laugh for no real reason.
• An appreciation of jazz music. What type of records do you think they played at these drug parties? I mean, if the normal kids were into Shakespeare...
• Shameless acts of romance. We see drug addicts embracing passionately on couches, in bedrooms, even while playing the piano.
• Holes in the fabric of time and space. While Dr. Carroll is on the witness stand, he states that during an "interscholastic tennis match" (did people really talk like him back then?) he witnessed Bill miss the ball by at least three or four feet, which he attributes as a symptom of marijuana addiction.
• Violent acts of murder. No, not Mary's--Dr. Carroll in an FBI office reads a case file on a reefer smoker who killed his entire family with an axe while under the influence.
• And last but not least, the final stage: incurable insanity. Ralph, by the end of the film.

Poor guy. Just one more laugh towards permanent dementia.

The only thing which the movie implies that marijuana DOESN'T do is hinder one's ability to play the piano. As a matter of fact, it appears that doing dope can actually IMPROVE it. In the film's most famous scene, Blanche attempts to calm Ralph down by playing some soothing piano music. Ralph by this time is higher than the Space Shuttle and just as anxious, so he tells Blanche to play faster...and faster...and faster...and faster. By this time we see Blanche, sitting at the piano, puffing out marijuana smoke, her hands unable to keep up with the overdubbed melody she is playing, looking like she is about to overheat. I cannot see how this scene helps the film's message, because it's so ridiculously over the top it's downright comical.

This Blanche has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

How ironic it is that this film became a cult classic with stoners, college kids and midnight movie goers in the 1970s, and was even satirized in a musical adaptation in 1998. It isn't uncommon that a movie with such camp value as this is cherished for all the wrong reasons--although its attempt at an anti-drug message is admirable, the bad acting, the poor production values, and a delivery so overt it would put an after-school special to shame make it impossible to take it seriously, and that's without taking into account the many things about marijuana that it ends up getting wrong.

I mean, when your film starts out with an account of federal agents disposing of an entire shipment of dope by THROWING IT IN A FURNACE, you pretty much fail on the educational front.

Don't let your kids learn about drugs from a movie more than seventy years out of date.