Just about everyone's heard of the film "Reefer Madness", but back in the Thirties there was a whole slew of these 'educational' drug flicks - "The Marijuana Menace", "She Shoulda' Said No", "Cocaine Fiends", and this one - "Marihuana". They're all pretty much on a par and picking a 'best' one pretty much becomes a function of which one you just watched. It's been a while now since I saw the others I've just mentioned, but as always, you have to wonder what audiences of the era must have thought about this kind of stuff. It all translates rather hokey and over the top today, especially in the connections made between smoking marijuana and immediately falling into a life of depravity and decadence. Sometimes you know, it takes a little longer.
The hook for this flick without question is the unrestricted nudity by the giggle girls who take it all off and go for a midnight swim at the beach. Given the year it was made, you might think that there would only be mere flashes of selected body parts to titillate the viewer, but breasts and behinds are right out there in all their glory. One girl even does a complete twirl at a distance from the camera, so you might say there's even some frontal nudity on display, but that's probably a stretch. Still, there's not a lot left to the imagination.
As in all these stories, things happen at a pretty rapid pace once things start to go south for the main character. In this case, teenager Burma Roberts (Harley Wood) smokes a joint, gets pregnant, suffers her best friend's death by drowning, gets married, gives up her baby for adoption, starts dealing dope and eventually gets hooked on heroin herself. If that's not enough, she concocts a scheme with her pushers to kidnap her sister's adopted daughter. One guess who that adopted daughter really is.
Well the opening narrative states that this story was drawn from an 'actual case history', and if it was, fine, but I get the impression that all of these exploitation flicks were made on the fly without too much thought to get in the way. Like this one, they're all a hoot and a half, and even though they might have been intended to make you get serious about the subject matter, it's hard to imagine today that they had any effect at all on the intended audience. If you've never seen one you really owe it to yourself to check out what the fuss was all about back in the day.
The hook for this flick without question is the unrestricted nudity by the giggle girls who take it all off and go for a midnight swim at the beach. Given the year it was made, you might think that there would only be mere flashes of selected body parts to titillate the viewer, but breasts and behinds are right out there in all their glory. One girl even does a complete twirl at a distance from the camera, so you might say there's even some frontal nudity on display, but that's probably a stretch. Still, there's not a lot left to the imagination.
As in all these stories, things happen at a pretty rapid pace once things start to go south for the main character. In this case, teenager Burma Roberts (Harley Wood) smokes a joint, gets pregnant, suffers her best friend's death by drowning, gets married, gives up her baby for adoption, starts dealing dope and eventually gets hooked on heroin herself. If that's not enough, she concocts a scheme with her pushers to kidnap her sister's adopted daughter. One guess who that adopted daughter really is.
Well the opening narrative states that this story was drawn from an 'actual case history', and if it was, fine, but I get the impression that all of these exploitation flicks were made on the fly without too much thought to get in the way. Like this one, they're all a hoot and a half, and even though they might have been intended to make you get serious about the subject matter, it's hard to imagine today that they had any effect at all on the intended audience. If you've never seen one you really owe it to yourself to check out what the fuss was all about back in the day.