‘Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical’ Hilariously Spoofs The Infamous Propaganda Film, But Also Has Something Serious To Say About Prohibition

At this point, the jig is pretty much up on the menace of marijuana, right? Most of the country has legalized it, and those states yet to do so have their hands full with opioids anyhow. Here in my home of Brooklyn, New York, it is slightly easier for an adult to make purchase of a joint than a gallon of milk, and yet the city’s social order has not collapsed into anarchy. The ready availability and evident non-disastrousness of cannabis have robbed the drug of its fearsome imaginary power, now normalized to the point that the 91-year-old Rita Moreno can enjoy a harmless good time getting zonked on edibles in 80 for Brady without any need for tut-tutting. Somewhere in the past couple years, THC crossed a crucial acceptability threshold for the average voter, who now understands the substance to pose less of a threat to individual mental health or the fabric of society than an hour spent clicking through the YouTube algorithm. 

The flip side is that those still railing against The Pot sound hopelessly alarmist, their stance exposed as a bad-faith method of crowd control designed to keep jails stocked with undesirables. Such self-appointed watchdogs might as well be urging against the evils of drink and dancing, their narc tendencies going past moralistic buzz-harshing into total detachment from reality. 2005’s Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (available to stream now on Tubi, the people’s platform) lampoons this exact mentality, its ironic inside-joking about the scaremongered scourge of the “demon weed” since opened up to the general public by political progress. Through bloodshot eyes, lyricist Kevin Murphy, composer Dan Studney, and director Andy Fickman saw what would be thrust into plain sight for the mainstream decades later: marijuana has an inherently comical way of making its opponents far more paranoid than its users. 

Marijuana has an inherently comical way of making its opponents far more paranoid than its users.

The 1936 propaganda film Reefer Madness (initially titled Tell Your Children) overstated the case against getting high to delusional extremes, its over-the-top melodrama embraced as camp by future generations of smokers at countless midnight showings. A 1998 musical spoof absorbed that satirical distance into the text with a wink, refashioning itself as a hysterical cautionary tale in which the corruptive influence of mari-huana sullies the interwar innocence of smalltown Americana. The off-Broadway production’s cast members Christian Campbell, John Kassir, and a pre-fame Kristen Bell — they spent 9/11 together huddled in the producer’s apartment, then gave a cathartic performance downtown in the days afterward for an audience of four — all reprised their roles in the screen adaptation broadcast on Showtime, summoned to Los Angeles by the original creative team. More than evoking the old-timey essence of the period with greater stylistic precision, their cinematic treatment allows audiences to freely revisit this piss-take on the Drug War, its premise newly accessible to viewers not partaking in neurochemical accompaniment. (Those who do may get more laughs out of it, but that’s true of most movies, and indeed, most things in life.) 

A framing device introduces The Lecturer (Alan Cumming, who also appears as a Satanic humanoid goat and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the actor’s libertine reputation a subtle elbow to the ribs), come to an idyllic suburb with a touring presentation about the cutting-edge depravities of “the new Public Enemy No. 1.” The rousing opening number makes his pre-Red Scare partisan sympathies clear, as he sings of a drug “creeping like a Communist,” “stealthy as a Socialist,” and finally, “deadly as the Democrats.” The plot occasionally checks back in with him and his classroom full of concerned parents, through which we get a taste of his underhanded tactics; one man tentatively wonders if this talk about the U.S. of A. going to hell isn’t all a bit dramatic, and the Lecturer swiftly deploys ad hominem attacks on his lack of formal education and Polish last name. The unstated refrain of “If you’re not with us, you’re against all that’s good, right, and decent” sounds eerily familiar.

The Lecturer’s pointed perspective colors the telling of the main story within the story, a wildly implausible yarn of sin, penance, and redemption. Everything manifests as the afterschool-special version of itself, starting with Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell), the squeaky-cleanest All-American-est boy who ever lived. He and chaste squeeze Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) speak in a neat-o teenybopper vernacular, their naïveté underscored by a romantic duet in which they cheerfully misread Romeo and Juliet as a happily-ever-after paean to love based on its first few scenes. They’ll soon meet a fate no less tragic due to the noxious influence of “grass,” peddled by two-bit hustler Jack (Steven Weber, pretty much doing Jimmy Cagney in White Heat), his addicted moll Mae (Ana Gasteyer), house floozy Sally (Amy Spanger, announcing herself in auspicious fashion with “what a night, I was in more laps than a napkin”), and dissolute tweaker Ralph (John Kassir). Jack lurks at the local five-and-dime, impressing youngsters with his dance moves — he does a steamy pas de deux with proprietor Neve Campbell, sister of Christian — until he can lure them back to his den of degradation.

There, a single toke sends wayward souls off to the races of damnation. One of the film’s trustiest runnings gags revolves around the seemingly limitless mind-altering potential of marijuana, portrayed here as a combination of LSD, MDMA, and crystal meth. One puff, and Jimmy enters a hallucinatory jungle-dimension where he’s stripped naked and drawn into an orgy; a bite of a brownie concealing a special ingredient turns everything into a peppy cartoon; Ralph tricks Mary into a drag off of what he says is a regular ol’ cigarette, and she instantaneously transforms into a BDSM freak with appetites more voracious than he can handle. The attempts at salvation abide by this same knowingly absurd exaggeration, Jesus Christ himself (Robert Torti) descending from his celestial plane to lead a nightclub-act showstopper exhorting Jimmy to “get high on God.” 

Through the blatant falseness, the Lecturer lays out his preferred vision of America, governed by a code people like him would be in charge of arbitrating. He often steps into his own narration to editorialize, offering commentary on how jazz musicians use the stoned stupor created by their grace notes to compel white women into acts of unspeakable self-debasement, or how Chinese immigrants will gladly purchase and eat human infants. The old-timey racism is of a piece with an overall current of conservatism that reaches a head in the grand finale, as Jimmy sits on death row. (He struck and killed an old man while on a hopped-up joyride, the abrupt speed with which we whizz past plot points an intentional part of the bit.) Mae turns over a non-narcotic new leaf, and after hacking her way through a horde of zombies in gruesomely violent fashion — in the coup de grace, she rips Jack’s still-beating heart out of his chest, Mola Ram-style — she rushes to save Jimmy’s bacon. She and a cigarette-holder-chomping FDR materialize in a deus ex machina to issue a Presidential pardon for the misled, repentant Jimmy, and they all join in song about the message of patriotism they hope to spread far and wide. 

Their notion of a brighter tomorrow points to the darker parts of our present, however. The closing production number “Tell ‘Em the Truth” invokes star-spangled iconography to put forth exploitation of ignorance and fear as a proud American tradition, with Uncle Sam, George Washington, and Lady Liberty popping by to teach the impressionable among us “who to demonize” and “what politics to despise.” Their triumphant verses grow more overtly fascist, as “turning your neighbors in” leads to a crackling bonfire on which townspeople throw the collected works of Freud, copies of On the Origin of Species and The Communist Manifesto, and some film-reel canisters labeled It Happened One Night. For so long, the criminalization of marijuana was treated like a niche issue, relevant only to hippies and other fringe types. But for all its daffy comedy, Reefer Madness has something serious to say about how prohibition — born as a pet project of news magnate William Randolph Hearst — clears a path for further reactionary overreach. Just something to think about this April 20th, but don’t let it kill your vibe or anything. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.