Tell Your Children (1938)

How sad is this?

Good movie but grossly overrated

A Major Disappointment

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

You MUST see the original "Reefer Madness" before watching this, otherwise the parody aspect would be difficult to understand. This Is an excellent movie, a brilliant parody, superb satire, and although musicals are certainly not my bag, I even enjoy the tunes & dances. Please make sure you watch the original first, otherwise you'll not be able to appreciate the excellence of this gem! Skilled actors, great dancers and laughs by the bucket-load...what more could you want? Have a drink and a smoke before watching(over 21's only of course).

Nothing can be as good enough to quantify a 10/10 but I gave this documentary a 10/10 as it reminds me about all of the culture surrounding this dear plant in the first instance. From the Social platforms that effect/affect almost every person around us today, through to the political arena where small groups of people decide the plant's fate and then on to the medical aspect of it's interaction with us. The original is black and white, but if you can get one hand around the colorized edition of Reefer Madness, and the other around a freshly rolled assistant then do so. Then humour yourself at the then social-political ideology engulfing minds at the time just, and for us now to realize how far we have come. Also sit back and watch the curiously purple smoke the folk extricated in this colorized edition...

"Reefer Madness" describes marijuana as "the new drug menace, which is destroying the youth of America". And you would think that this might just be a hyperbolic tagline on an anti-drug poster, but the filmmakers back that up with an alarmingly earnest sense of paranoia and hysteria. They're serious. As an unintentional comedy, "Reefer Madness" takes its time getting going. The dialogue of these unrelatable characters is peppered with the usual "swell"s, "gee"s, etc. of the time. The real fun occurs when the wretched mary jane rears its ugly head. Pretty soon, those evil pushers have gotten our upright moral youth speeding off after a vehicular homicide, raping young girls, shooting people, window-diving, and descending into general madness. And then they listen to that risqué jazz music!It's not hard to see why this movie's a cult classic. It's absurd in its warnings, firebrand in its portrayals, and undeniably goofy. But that's how it comes off now. I really do wonder how effective this movie was in what seems like the original "Just Say No" campaign. Did people take this seriously? Judging from the continuation of such dire warning movies as "Boys Beware" [1961] (extolling the dangers of homosexuals), it'd be easy to conclude so. And that just makes this all the more amusing.A 7/10 on the ridiculous scale

Sure I was laughing! I laughed about the bad, baaaad acting; the absurd premise and the horrible directing, convincing me that the crew must have been stoned. I laughed at the piano being played too fast, the maniacally laughing and the accidental shooting. I cracked up at lines like "one puff and you're hooked", the ludicrous supposition that Marihuana (apparently pronounced "Maahr-Wanna" in those parts of the world) is a narcotic and the assumption that THC, similar to thinking-too-hard-and-too-much, will drive you psychotic.And sure, I had just smoked a huge joint, having watched this during a holiday in Amsterdam and was high like a kite (though I have to admit: I didn't feel like playing the piano too fast, nor did it inspire me to gun anybody down).But then I began to reflect: this movie is almost 80-years old and there were still people who believed the hackneyed nonsense it propagated. I thought about all the ruined lives of those who had been caught with a few joints. I thought about Aids, cancer and multiple scleroses patients who are denied alternative medication and about all the lives that have been lost in the so-called "war on drugs" that keeps the mafia and drug-cartels alive and prosperous.That's when I stopped laughing.