Reefer Madness, also known as Tell Your Children, also known as The Burning Question, also known as Dope Addict, also known as Doped Youth, also known as Love Madness (the producer famously renamed movies to trick audiences into seeing them again and again) is a movie funded by a church group for parent groups that somehow got shown around exploitation film circuits. It involves a group of teenagers who discover marijuana, and are thusly lead down a path of attempted rape, suicide, shooting people, running people over with cars, and playing the piano really fast.
The tale is being told by a professor who tells the PTA group he’s addressing that they’re about to hear the “true story” of the recent teen tragedy (this is slightly strange, as most events he couldn’t possibly know about since he wasn’t there and no one would even be alive to tell him). The teens are lured into a marijuana club by a drug pushing couple (who sleep in separate beds, so maybe they’re not a couple) who have nothing better to do than to give teenagers drugs for free (I don’t recall them ever asking for money for their product). At first this is nothing more than them laughing uncontrollably, playing the piano, and flopping around like they have no bones.
But the real trouble begins when one of the teens, Jimmy, begins speeding in his car while high and runs an elderly man over. He never gets caught for this, never admits it, yet the professor telling the story somehow knows all about it...just remember he’s telling the true story. Later, one of the dope fiends, Ralph, tries to rape a woman, Mary, but her boyfriend, Bill, comes in and hallucinates that she’s not being raped but is willingly having sex with him, so he charges in and fights him off, but a gun accidently goes off and kills Mary. The rest of the movie involves the court case surrounding her death.
Personally I found
this part a little weird because the fact that Bill hallucinated (because marijuana
makes you do that) his girlfriend not being raped is slightly irrelevant. Would
he have not charged in if he knew she was being raped? If so, the drugs may not
be the problem. Also, despite being a teenager (so they say) he smokes tobacco
before taking up the roach. The movie seems to have nothing to say about this.
Also her shooting really had nothing to do with drugs. The Ralph character is
completely insane and doesn’t need dope as an excuse to rape a nearby woman,
and the fact that they struggled with each other and somebody accidently shot off a gun is unconnected to the whole marijuna problem. Later in the film, Blanche (one of
the dope fiends), jumps out of window to her death because of the guilt she’s
feeling. But she wasn’t high when she killed herself (well high enough (little
suicide joke) so once again another tragedy only slightly related to the film’s
crux. The only crime indisputably related to marijuana was the hit and run,
which went unpunished anyway.
Some may argue
that this movie slightly exaggerates the dangers of marijuana, and by some I
mean everyone but the most delusional drug warrior, and slightly exaggerate I
mean insanely exaggerate. The movie has a strong following among other dope
fiends, no doubt because it’s a window into their own lives of rape, murder,
and pianos. It’s not really one of the best worst movies in my opinion, more
like one of the best shout-questions-at-the-screen-movies. If you want to know
the true story behind cannabis use, check it out. I don’t usually say this, but
see the colorized version if you can where all the marijuana smoke puffs are
multi-colored by someone who got carried away on the restoration computer.
