Wednesday, April 21, 2010

4/20 Day: Alice in Acidland

Dude, this holiday is like, totally new.  Stoners everywhere find the juxtaposition of these two numbers on the calendar to be symbolic of...um, what does 4-20 stand for again?  Seriously, I'm never done drugs, so I don't get it.  What I do get is shitty movies so let's focus on that.  Something Weird Video is a company that drudges through the vaults to find the movies that movie companies want to bury.  Way to dig through the trash, guys!  On the plus side, they are the main distributor of the Herschell Gordon Lewis film catalog.  On the negative side, they have released The Sex Lives of the Three Musketeers and Tarzun in the Valley of Lust, one of two porn-based parodies of Tarzan.  They released the other one too, by the way.  Which category does this film fall into?  Find out in my review of...
The film begins with some narration and three problems are immediate.  One- the film is in cheap, dirty-looking black and white.  Second, the film stock appears to have been left in a vault filled with water, popping and crackling every other second.  Third, the film has no actual on-screen dialogue.  All of the plot is conveyed by narration- bad narration at that!  When a film reminds me of The Beast of Yucca Flats, it has already failed.
The plot is insultingly-simple: new girl comes into town, meets lesbian teacher and gets corrupted by drugs.  In their first real meeting together, they smoke pot in front of a Hollywood Hills side pool and go take a bath together.  Watch as the teacher takes a full minute to pull down the girl's bottoms, which appears to have been sewn into her skin!  In a truly dated bit, the narrator (who was pulled right out of a '30s propaganda film) explains that our Alice was pulled into the 'sex for pleasure' scene.  Yeah, she should be in the 'sex for producing two dozen kids because you're afraid of Muslims overtaking the world' scene instead.  Ah, you crazy Quiver Fulls.
There is almost no more actual plot to this movie.  We get another party where we are introduced to a virginal girl.  Naturally, she is seduced with drugs and sex.  In a bit of hap-hazard writing, we are told that Alice's friend committed suicide after taking acid and the teacher left.  Way to show us that, movie!  After more random dry-humping and talk about the evils of drugs, we get the film's freak-out scene...five minutes before the end.
Gee, hope it was worth the 48 minutes of boredom.  We need a stinger to close this 'story' out on though.  What do we get?  A slow-zooming shot of Alice in a sanitarium, apparently having been driven mad by drugs.  Our narrator explains that Alice is doomed and throws in some lazy Alice in Wonderland references.  The End.
This movie sucked.  Seriously, Something Weird either uncovers freaky gold or utter, utter shit.  Do you guys need to resurrect every roadshow movie ever made?  There is a reason why these films were a product of their time and did not carry on!  Lots of things from the '60s lived on well into the 1990s and 2000s, including Woody Allen, slapstick comedy and George Carlin.  I do have to applaud the company's ability to dig up crazy shit though- I just don't really want to see all of it.  Instead of putting out a double-feature on interracial love movies (they already have, by the way), try tracking down London After Midnight for us.  If you do, I'll forgive you for Blood Freak and, maybe, Please Don't Eat My Mother.
Next up, my tradition of finding needlessly-obscure movies continues.  This time, I bring you another Indian remake of a horror film- this time from Japan.  Stay tuned...

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