Marihuana

Marihuana (1936)

Runtime: 57 minutes

Directed by: Dwain Esper

Starring: Harley Wood, Hugh McArthur, Pat Carlyle, Paul Ellis, Dorothy Dehn

From: Roadshow Attractions

This is another pot-based exploitation film from the 1930's. It is not as famous as Reefer Madness but I say it's just as hilariously bad. My explanation of why is below: 

I figured that since I recently reviewed Reefer Madness here, it only made sense to see the other 1936 movie involving marijuana. This isn't as popular or infamous as Reefer, but those two are meant to be seen together as both are similar in terms of unintentional hilarity. I had watched this once before, but that was like in 2003, so my memories were faint. And the guy who distributed Reefer (Dwain Esper) directed this, from a script written by his wife.

This is sleazier than RM; the opening credits has a background painting of three women, one of them topless. What an opening crawl that was, being racist against “the Asiatic countries” for being the origin of ganja and not being educated enough to stop that area's addiction to narcotics. I won't even get started on how wrong such a statement is. Then again, almost in the middle of the picture, there are several fully nude women seen. In addition, there's a gag where a drunk is spilling his beer in a nightclub and it's made to look like he's pissing right at the bar. Remember that films like these at the time went out on tour across the United States under the guise of being “educational”.

Anyhow, this is ridiculous claptrap about how some more teenage squares get roped into smoking the chronic and it immediately causes problems. In this case, there's skinny-dipping, a drowning, and the lead girl-for some reason named BURMA-becomes pregnant. From there, a lot of melodramatic things happen, including a kidnapping and the dealing of heroin. It's all so laughable, and aside from all the giggling, not an accurate depiction of what bud is like. At least the picture is less than an hour long.