Reefer Madness (originally created as Tell Your Child and is sometimes titled Burned Questions , Dope Addicts , Teenagers Stranded , and < b> Love Madness ) is a 1936 American propaganda film that revolves around melodramatic events that occur when high school students are enticed by the anesthesia to try marijuana - from hit-and-run, accident, murder, attempted suicide rape, hallucinations, and descend into madness due to marijuana addiction. The film was directed by Louis Gasnier and featured mainly lesser-known actors.
Originally funded by a group of churches titled Tell Your Children, the film is intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale that tries to teach them about the dangers of using marijuana. However, as soon as the film was taken, the film was purchased by producer Dwain Esper, who cut back the film for distribution on an exploitation film circuit that began in 1938-1939 until the 1940s and 1950s.
The film was "rediscovered" in the early 1970s and gained new life as an unintentional insinuation among supporters of cannabis policy reform. Criticism, however, has highlighted it as one of the worst films ever made. Today, it is in the public domain in the United States.
Video Reefer Madness
Plot
Mae Coleman and Jack Perry are unmarried couples who live together and sell marijuana. Mae preferred to sell marijuana to her own age customers, while unscrupulous Jack sold it to the teenagers. Ralph Wiley, a former psychotic student who became a fellow dealer, and Blanche helped Jack sell marijuana to the students. Young students Bill Harper and Jimmy Lane were invited to Mae and Jack's apartment by Blanche and Ralph. Jimmy took Bill to the party. There, Jack ran out of reefer. Jimmy, who owns the car, encourages him to take even more. Arriving at Jack's "boss" headquarters, he comes out and Jimmy asks for a cigarette. Jack gave her a joint. Then, when Jack got back down and got into the car, Jimmy drove dangerously, along the road crashing into a pedestrian in his car. A few days later, Jack tells Jimmy that the pedestrian died from his injuries. Jack agrees to keep Jimmy's name out of the case, provided he agrees to "forget he's been in Mae's apartment". Jimmy did escape from the consequences of his crime - a rare occurrence in the film.
Bill started an affair with Blanche. Mary, Jimmy's sister and boyfriend Bill, went to Mae's apartment looking for Jimmy and received a connection from Ralph, thinking it was a regular cigarette. When he refuses Ralph's advance, he tries to rape her. Bill gets out of the bedroom after having sex with Blanche and hallucinates that Mary strips to Ralph. He attacked Ralph. When the two fight, Jack tries to share it by hitting Bill with the butt of his gun. His gun exploded and Mary was shot dead. Jack puts the gun in Bill's unconscious hand and wakes it up. Bill sees the gun in his hand and is led to believe that he has killed Mary. The group of dealers lay for a while at Blanche's apartment while Bill's trial took place. Ralph loses his senses and wants to tell the police who are actually responsible for Mary's death. This film links Ralph's madness to marijuana use.
Seeking advice from his boss, Jack is told to shoot Ralph so he keeps his mouth shut. Meanwhile, in the apartment, Blanche offers to play some piano music for Ralph to keep his mind off things. They were both very tall and Ralph told him to play faster. Jack shows up and Ralph immediately feels that Jack wants to kill him so he beat Jack to death. The police arrested Ralph, Mae and Blanche. Mae and gang talks rounded off. Blanche explains that Bill is innocent and he is released. Blanche is then held as a material witness to the case against Ralph but, rather than testifying against him, he jumps out the window and falls to his death. Ralph was put into asylum for someone who was criminally mad "for the rest of his natural life".
The story of this film is told in the sequence of bracketing on a lecture given at the Parent Teacher Association meeting by the headmaster of the secondary school, Dr. Alfred Carroll. At the end of the film, he told his parents that he was told that events similar to those he described would likely happen again and then pointed at random parents in the audience and warned that "the next tragedy might happen to your daughter.... or your son... or yours or yours... "before pointing directly to the camera and saying firmly"... or YOURS! "as the words" TELL YOUR CHILDREN "appear on the screen.
Maps Reefer Madness
Cast
Production and history
In 1936 or 1938, Tell Your Children was funded and created by church groups and is intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale that tries to teach them about the dangers of using marijuana. Originally produced by George Hirliman; However, shortly after the film was made, the film was bought by exploit filmmaker Dwain Esper, who included a lewd shot. In 1938 or 1939, Esper began distributing it on the exploitation circuit where it was originally released in at least four areas, each with their own title for the movie: the first region to filter it was the South, where it went by Tell the Kids You (1938 or 1939). West of Denver, Colorado, the film is commonly known as Doped Youth (1940). In New England, it was known as Reefer Madness (1940 or 1947), while in the Pennsylvania/West Virginia region it was called The Burning Question (1940). The film was then screened throughout the country during the 1940s under various titles and Albert Dezel of Detroit eventually purchased all rights in 1951 for use in screening of roadshows throughout the 1950s.
Such exploitative educational films were common in the years after the adoption of a tighter version of the Production Code in 1934. Other films include Esper himself previously Marihuana (1936) and Elmer Clifton > Assassin of Youth (1937) and the subject of marijuana are very popular in the hysteria surrounding the Ansrower Ganja Tax Act of 1937.
The concept of after-market films in film distribution has not been developed, especially for films that are outside the boundaries of studio systems, and are therefore considered "forbidden fruit." For this reason both Esper and original producer George Hirliman did not care to protect the copyright of the film; it thus has an undue copyright notice that void the copyright. More than 30 years later, in the spring of 1972, NORML founder Keith Stroup found copies of the film in the Library of Congress archive and bought a print for $ 297. As part of a fundraising campaign, NORML showed Reefer Madness on college campuses up and down California, asked for a $ 1 contribution to receipts and raised $ 16,000 to support the California Ganja Initiative, a political group that sought to legalize marijuana in the autumn 1972 election. Robert Shaye of New Line Cinema finally heard about the hit underground and go to see it in Bleecker Street Cinema. He sees the movie carrying inappropriate copyright notifications and realizes it's in the public domain. Looking for material for the New Line college circuit, he can get an original copy of a collector and begin distributing the film nationally, "making a bit of luck for the New Line."
Reception
Reefer Madness is considered a classic cult and one of the best examples of midnight movies. His fans enjoyed the movie for an unintentional production value that made it a hit in the 1970s.
The Los Angeles Times claimed that Reefer Madness was the first film touted as the "worst". Leonard Maltin called it "the ancestor of all the 'Worst' movies." Las Vegas CityLife named it the "worst" runner-up for Plan 9 from Outer Space, and AMC described it as "one of the worst films ever made." The film holds a 46% approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator website.
Adaptations
Sean Abley's stage adaptation, Reefer Madness, ran for a year in Chicago in 1992, and had one show in 1993 as well.
The film was faked in Reefer Madness music (1998), later made into Reefer Madness television (2005), featuring actors Alan Cumming, Kristen Bell, Christian Campbell and Ana Gasteyer.
In 2004, 20th Century Fox, in collaboration with Legend Films, released a colored version on DVD. The original release date was April 20, 2004, reference to the drug slang term "420". Also during the movie, the numbers "4" and then "20" flashed very quickly (as a joke on subliminal messages), which is an effect added by Legend Films. It features a deliberately unrealistic color scheme that adds to the camphor humor of the movie. Smoke from "marijuana" is made to look green, blue, orange and purple, the colored smoke of everyone representing their mood and the different "addictive levels". This DVD also includes a short movie titled Ganja Ganja Grandpa Books; a new trailer for Reefer Madness produced by Legend Films; and two audio comments: one discusses color design and the other is a comedy comment by Michael J. Nelson, formerly of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame. Legend has copyright for the colored version. While most praised it for the treatment of cult films, some viewers claimed that the color choice would be more in line with films about LSD than movies about marijuana.
See also
- Hemp for Victory
- List of movies in the public domain in the United States
- Perversion for Untung
- Sex Madness
- How to Uninstall Your Husband's Outfit
References
External links
- Reefer Madness is available for free download on the Internet Archive
- Reefer Madness on IMDb
- Reefer Madness in the TCM Film Database
- Reefer Madness at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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