Marijuana is a plant that people have known the calming effects of for centuries, and people in the 30s were just as concerned with its proliferation as they are now. Whether or not it's true that smoking it makes you lazier and less likely to carry out simple tasks is beyond the scope of this movie, but it shows how consuming a seemingly harmless plant can destroy your life. Maybe I should start by saying that this movie is one of the epitomes of "it's so bad it's good" cinema, and most people will agree that it's trash. The film's heart is in the right place, since it's goal is to steer people away from wanting to smoke weed, but when someone tells you you're not supposed to do something and that it's bad, that just makes them want it more. The storyline of this movie is essentially about a college dropout who decides to further damage his good standing in life by selling the drug to unsuspecting college and high school kids, one of which later runs somebody over in a car while high. The behavior of the students continues to rapidly deteriorate after one of them accidentally kills a girl because his gun went off by mistake. It really is just a chain reaction of bad decisions that get them into trouble again and again all because they smoked weed that they got from the two kids earlier in the movie. The story is nothing special and the overreacting of the kids in the movie is absolutely hilarious. I should have been mad at the movie for being so terrible, but I wasn't because the bad acting is just funny to observe. Maybe it's because I knew before I went into it that it was considered one of the worst movies, but it's bad in a special way. Does that affect the score at all? Of course not. It's terrible. Still, the movie deserves recognition because it's one of the first movies to show the dangers of addiction, and the corniness of it made it a classic among people in the 70s. It is amusing to watch because in spite of its awfulness, the rest of the movie takes itself so seriously.
Review of Reefer Madness
