Reefer Madness (1936)

This cult classic is amongst the most important of all teen-scare, drugsploitation flick. Its also been released as Tell Your Children in 1938 and Dope Addict, Doped Youth, Love Madness and The Burning Question.

Reefer Madness shows marijuana as you have never seen it before. An evil, evil drug! and I don't mean evil in the sense of a bunch of long haired smelly hippies talking about peace and love... I'm talking about crazed gun slinging mobsters who are quick to turn the youth onto "the devils weed".

According to Reefer Madness, marijuana isn't the mellow drug that you thought it was. Belly-laughs turn to madness and anything can happen from violent beatings with a cane to murder. The most memorable scene shows a man excessively smoking grass while a woman plays the piano. "Bring me some reefers". "Play it faster! Faster! Play it faster!"

I was lucky enough to catch this thing in the theater in a strange colorized version. Not that the color made the film any better it was just something different. The main thing that I found interesting about the colorized version was that the clouds of smoke was all different crazy colors. Each person exhaled a different color smoke. We had reds, blues, yellows, purples etc.

Anybody who is into teen-scare movies or exploitation films in general is usually familiar with this one. Its by no means a great example of good film making. Its loaded with bad acting, bad editing and very strange camera perspectives. We have a horrible special effect in a court house with a swinging noose and very silly dialogue. In other words its a bad example of film making but a good example in exploitation and bad taste.

Reefer Madness comes complete with a car crash, the obvious gratuitous marijuana smoking, death by hand gun, a suicide (complete with leap through a window), excessive laughing, violent cane-fu, crazy haircuts, and lots of youngster making out in a stoned stupor.

Sex Madness (1938)

This early Sex Hygiene flick tries and fails to cash in on the cult success of Reefer Madness with a similar title. It also went under the title of Human Wreckage and They Must Be Told but when its all said and done was just another syphilis scare flick with very little to offer.

It follows a young soon to be married woman who contracts the killer disease in a one night stand at a burlesque show. She seeks help from various doctors and is mislead into believing that she is cured. She then goes through with her marriage and infects her husband and new born baby. Syphilis quickly takes its toll on the (not so happy) family and naturally suicide seems to be the only alternative.

Sure we get to see some pictures of infected people who are rotting away from the disease which is very necessary for this genre but the film is very tame compared to others in the same category. Sex Madness pales in comparison to films like Mom And Dad. There is no rotting penises on display here nor is there the birth of a baby. Instead Sex Madness focuses more on "Quack" doctors which would translate into modern English as a fraud who is out for the money and dishes out foney vaccines allowing victims to go uncured. Apparently in 1938 there must have been a whole lot of Quacks because just about ever character in this film is fooled by these con-men in lab coats.

The Sex Hygiene films is one of the earliest examples of American Sexploitation and I suppose this film did exploit the subject matter of sexually transmitted diseases to show a bit of flesh but a bit is a over statement. We get a insinuated lesbian couple, burlesque dancing and some young folk chit-chatting about promiscuous encounters with the opposite sex. A sex maniac rapist makes the papers after attending a burlesque show and the most racy scene takes place in a girl dressing room. We see some giant 30's style pointed bras and that's about it. Sex Madness comes from the same madman director who gave us Maniac (1934) which is a much more daring film for the time. I'd skip it and seek out a better and more exploitative title in the genre.

Mom And Dad (1945)

Exploiteer Kroger Babb dreamed this one up and created the ultimate in sex hygiene sexploits. Mom And Dad was his baby and he promoted it like a circus attraction. His crew would travel from town to town and plaster the movie posters on anything they could find.

The posters themselves were guaranteed to attract any youngster who walked passed, with separate screenings for boys and girls. Some posters insisted that parents take their children to see the film but of course most parents were shocked and appalled that such pictures were coming to their neighborhood. The church tried to ban the film from playing and all across the country god fearing assholes protested its very existence. Naturally this only adds to the hype and controversy around a film and in the world of exploitation, what more could a film maker ask for? In many towns, once the movie screened it would be interrupted at a certain point and sex hygiene books would be passed out to the audience... That is for a price of course.

Word gets around in a small town and Mom And Dad especially appealed to the youth with the rumors of full frontal male and female nudity. I suppose in 1947 this kind of thing was on every teenagers mind but very few have seen the opposite sex in the nude. Well Mom And Dad offered this... At a price that is. If the kids wanted to play they had to pay in more then one way. First they were forced to sit through the sappy story of June, a teenage girl who got in a bit of "trouble" you see naive June fell for a older boy with some smooth-talkin and nice eyes. Well its not long before June is in the back seat of lover-boys car and she finds herself knocked up... Or in "trouble". Throughout the whole film, the word pregnant is not used once. It is substituted with the word trouble and it really makes no sense because in the later portion of the film we do get the full male/female nudity but we also get a explicit child birth with gore pouring all over the place. We also get a very disturbing cesarean section, surgery scene and I have to admit I cringe every time I see it. Last but not least we have the venereal disease footage and this segment is pretty disturbing as well. We see cripples, holes in the roof of the mouth, holes in the eyes, rotten feet, visible bones protruding through flesh, V.D. infected genitals (male & female), and we even get silly 40's diagrams showing the spread of Syphilis.

Many consider Mom And Dad the most successful exploitation film of all time and it is a must see for anyone interested in the alternative to Hollywood films. Don't listen to those "self styled moralists" and church goers... and don't miss Mom And Dad when it comes to your town.

The Hard Road (1970)

The Hard Road is not a pretty picture! Or at least that's what the tagline says and I think I'm going to have to agree. This anti-drug sexual hygiene scare flick is about a 17 year old girl named Pam and bad choices she makes and The Hard Road she chooses. The film opens up with teenage Pam delivering a baby which unfortunately they didn't show in true exploitation fashion. Pam chooses to put the baby up for adoption and tries to get on with her normal teenage life but the kids in school all know what happened and they are making life very hard for Pam. Pam's parents also feel the pressures of their judgemental surroundings and dad starts drinking heavily while mom pops over the counter pills. Pam gets a job as a secretary for a sleazy man named Leo who runs a music agency. Leo likes to watch Pam through a secret two way mirror in his office but unfortunately the most Pam skin we get is watching her fix her thigh high stalkings. Sorry guys but this ones not a skin flick. Pam meets a rocker who introduces her to some grass and trashy hippie folk. Pam plunges further and further into depravity as she gets turned onto wild orgies, psychedelics, pills and heroin.
As I mentioned this is not a sexploitation flick so we don't get much nudity in the sex scenes. Instead were treated to another disturbing film within the film. Pam catches Gonorrhea and we get a good honest sex hygiene scare film with nasty pictures of rotting genitals and open sores. Its really the typical stuff you see in all these v.d. scare flicks but this one manages to catch us a bit off guard when it pretty much comes from nowhere.
My favorite scenes are probably all the weird hippy-trippy scenes with wide angle lenses and unique camera work. The proper use of lighting and camera angles actually shows a bit of talent on the filmmakers end. As the film goes on we enter darker territory with harder drugs and more violent characters. Pam eventually sees not everyone is a peace loving hippy. There is one hilarious seen where a "o.d." hippy is running through a long tunnel screaming his lungs out. He is then picked up by a friend and the two junkies mug a business man. They kick him in the face with sandals on their feet until the mans face is red with blood and every time they kick him his head rocks back and forth like a bobble-head. This scene has to be seen to be believed. Another very memorable seen is the painful withdrawal from heroin in a prison cell. The junkie smashes his face into a cement wall and goes into convulsions in a pretty realistic scene. The film all comes to a 70's downer ending with Pam having a hell of a acid trip at a airport runway. She is hit by a car and killed. As the tagline says The Hard Road Is Not A Pretty Picture.

Damaged Goods (1961)

Damaged Goods follows the typical exploitation sex hygiene format from beginning to end. This one is about a innocent teenage couple named Jim and Judy who plan to get married after high school. Their plans come to a halt when Judy finds out that Jim and his car club "The Torches" took a little road trip where they picked up some prostitutes. Jim picks up a little more then a prostitute. That's right clean cut Jim caught V.D., Syphilis to be exact.
Damaged Goods is pretty boring up until the boys pick up the hookers. Then we are treated to another sex hygiene flick within the flick that is really relatively tame compared to other flicks in this genre like Mom And Dad. The most disturbing scene in this one is probably a close up of a baby girl who is infected with Syphilis. We also get a bow legged cripple and some nasty looking sores. Other then that Damaged Goods offers a cheesy burlesque scene, some big 60's underwear and some really uptight parents. Surf rock fans will be happy to know that The Ventures music fills all the driving scenes. Its to bad its the same song over and over again.
Doesn't offer up anything all that new or memorable but fans of this type of film won't be let down. After all they are always pretty similar.