Following on from Up In Smoke and Next Movie, Nice Dreams in retrospect sort of represents a crossroads for the stoner duo. During some of the skits that litter the show, they are at the top of their game. It is during others, when they seem to believe that just repeating the kind of material that worked in the previous two films will get laughs, that the opposite happens. Given that the next film to feature the Mexican stoners was Things Are Tough All Over, this can be described as the last genuinely funny Cheech and Chong film. People seem to believe that the duo lost their box office draw as the result of the Just Say No culture, and that might be true in a sort of coincidental manner. But the sad truth is that this comedy based around two hapless, jobless losers getting stoned and having a lot of misadventures got old very quickly. Next Movie and Up In Smoke were also basically a couple of funny skits with a lot of ordinary film linking them together, but Nice Dreams shows these occasional skits getting progressively less amusing.
The conceit of Nice Dreams is simple. Cheech and Chong play a pair of stoners who run a beachside marijuana plantation. An undercover operation to catch them in the act of selling their produce turns up evidence that some of the marijuana they grow is somehow capable of turning the smoker into something reptilian. Unfortunately, this subplot is barely set up, and never exploited to anything resembling its full potential. All we get is a few interesting shots of Stacy Keach turning into a man-sized lizard. If you have seen Up In Smoke, then you have no reason to watch any part of this film that Keach appears in. His character, dialogue, and routines are almost word for word lifted from Up In Smoke. During a large part of the film, he is utterly absent from proceedings as the heroes go off on all sorts of other whacky adventures.
One such detour involves a trip to a mental hospital where the doctor seems whackier than the patients. This gives Paul Reubens a chance to do his thing as the Howie Hamburger Dude, a slightly less orthodox role than as the hotel clerk in Next Movie. It is kind of strange that he appears childlike next to Cheech Marin, who is nearly half a foot shorter than him. Fans of Bad Santa might also recognise Tony Cox, although you would need to be more attentive than your average goof-spotter to notice him at any point. Evelyn Guerrero makes the second of three appearances as Donna, who is at the centre of one rather odd skit involving a naked Cheech riding atop an elevator car. Fans of the stoner duo may in fact see more of Cheech than they had wished during this part of the film. If that is not dedication to their art, then I do not know what is. There is also a mildly amusing Jimi Hendrix skit for those who did not get enough of this schtick in Police Academy 6.
Ultimately, the big problem with this, or any other Cheech and Chong film save Up In Smoke, is a lack of plot cohesion. It is almost as if the writers think to themselves "hey, this tack is no longer working, let's start a whole new film now". What basically saves this film is that when they do switch to a new tack, the one they switch to happens to work, at least for the first ten minutes thereof. This is a complete contrast to Still Smokin', where you have one skit that is good for about four laughs in amongst eighty minutes of complete crap. Perhaps if Cheech and Chong teamed up with some genuinely talented comic writers like Simon Pegg, they could come up with something that involves laughter from beginning to finish. They could even team up with George Romero and produce a stoner zombie film, which is something I would certainly pay to see.
In the end, however, this is little more than the fodder that helped the idea of Hollywood needing less studios take hold. Sure, we have less unfunny comedies these days, but we also have less genuinely funny ones. So I gave Nice Dreams a five out of ten. If you have already seen Up In Smoke and Next Movie, this is a good place to continue testing how long it takes you to get tired of the Cheech and Chong routine. Otherwise, I recommend you look at those two films instead.
3 out of 6 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink