Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Rifftrax Live!: Reefer Madness Blu-ray Movie Review

This is your MST3K on drugs.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 12, 2011

It might seem like an unlikely source for easy entertainment, but the United States Copyright database has some real gems hidden inside its mammoth listings. Years ago I co-wrote a musical comedy adaptation of the cult film Reefer Madness, and though my collaborator and I knew that the film was in the public domain (no one ever bothered to copyright these low budget exploitation knockoffs back in the day), we still wanted to see if there were other Reefers out there. Boy, were we amazed. There were scores (no pun intended) of adaptations, and we discovered a new one which had just been copyrighted, the Los Angeles production which was later broadcast on Showtime (to not very good reviews, but I digress). But in all of the Reefer Madnesses we found, one in particular stuck out and struck me as particularly funny. It was an industrial film made to market refrigerators and it was entitled Refer Madness. Who said those guys at companies like Whirlpool or Maytag don’t have senses of humor? Of course the source film has provided generations of viewers ample opportunity to laugh at the patently ridiculous shenanigans that ensue when the naïve youth of “your town” (as Reefer Madness democratically identifies its locale) take one puff of the demon weed and go instantly insane. Reefer Madness might have disappeared in a veritable puff of smoke after its late 1930’s premiere (where even then it probably elicited guffaws of derision), had it not been for its reincarnation as a late night “smoke along” entertainment for Baby Boomers of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This “next generation” was frankly more than likely stoned out of their minds as they watched Reefer Madness in its various midnight movie exhibitions, but the fact is you don’t need to take even one puff to enjoy the lunatic charms of this film.

Reefer Madness is so rife for parody and acerbic commentary it virtually invites heckling, and who better for that kind of activity than Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Michael J. Nelson? After MST3K was canceled, Nelson didn’t want to abandon his satirical commentary niche and came up with the idea of RiffTrax, a rather ingenious way to skirt copyright laws (though truth be told, a lot of if not most of MST3K “films” were public domain by design). RiffTrax provided consumers with downloadable commentaries they could synch with their own DVDs of the world’s worst in cinema. With the success of that enterprise, Nelson and his two MST3K compadres starting doing live RiffTrax shows, and this outing with Reefer Madness, as well as a gaggle of short subjects, is one of those performances (it should be noted that this Blu-ray is possible by simple virtue of the fact that Reefer Madness is public domain and no licensing fees needed to be paid). Nelson is joined onstage by Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, and this Blu-ray alternates between a 1.33:1 presentation of the main feature with voiceover commentary, to a 1.78:1 side by side presentation with the film playing on the left and three panels of the commentators stacked on top of each other on the right.

The three guys are inarguably hilarious, but what’s immediately apparent—at least from appearances—is that virtually all of these supposedly riffed “ad libs” are scripted, since all three guys seem to be reading from their lecterns. That may take away a bit from the seemingly off the cuff brilliance of MST3K, but it ultimately doesn’t make their comments any less funny. Some of the biggest laughs of the evening actually come from a couple of the shorts which precede the main feature. First up is a completely outré public service announcement sort of thing from the late 1930’s warning women not to launder their clothes in gasoline. No, I’m not kidding. Evidently back in the 1930’s there was an epidemic of horrible fires and disfigurements due to women thinking they could “dry clean” their own clothes in fuel, and this brave PSA sought to show women that that wasn’t exactly a smart idea. The three guys take the patent absurdity of this film to perfect levels of dry (no pun intended) wit.

That PSA is followed by one of the oddest documentary shorts ever, a 1970’s opus about grass—and by grass, I mean the lawn kind. Was there some kind of farmer’s coalition or seed aggregation that funded this bizarre little thing? We are introduced to all sorts of different grasses as well as shown “fun” and “inventive” things to do with grass, several of which are so completely weird I won’t spoil them for you by describing them here in this review. While this commentary is a little bit more hit and miss, the film itself is funny enough on its own. Interspersed with these “gems” are two contemporary ultra-short animated features by a friend of the guys with onscreen narration by the filmmaker’s five year old daughter. Those play with no additional commentary by the RiffTrax team. Also up for some serious derision is a bizarre old black and white cartoon that kind of plays like a Walt Disney Silly Symphony on drugs, obviously very appropriate considreing the main feature on tap here.

Reefer Madness is finally up and the guys of course pillory it mercilessly. A couple of sidebars may strike audiences as at least as funny as any of the inarguably hilarious commentary. First of all this is a colorized version of Reefer Madness, and all I can say is “this is your Reefer Madness on drugs,” so lurid and bizarre are the color choices. The funniest thing, though, is the lack of color in some weird places. Look, for example, at Dr. Carroll’s eyeglasses in the opening “tell your children” sequence: while the rest of Carroll’s face is a pumpkin orange-yellow, the colorists decided not to do anything with the area of his face covered by his glasses, and so his upper cheeks and eye sockets are good old gray-scale black and white. And throughout the film all sorts of people have black and white hair pasted onto floridly colored bodies. Can you have an acid flashback if you’ve never taken acid?

The commentary on the main feature goes pretty much as expected, simply because Reefer Madness is so easy to make fun of, as I and countless other people who adapted the movie into plays and musicals have discovered. Some of the lines are quite funny, including one of my favorites (I’m only going to mention one joke in this review so as not to spoil the hilarity). As the warning screed scrolls at the opening of the film, we repeatedly see the word “Marihuana” and the priceless comment “this film came out ten years before the letter ‘J’ was invented!” zings by. It’s patently silly and even childish, to be sure, but that was always part of what made MST3K so goofily enjoyable.

This is the sort of release which may play better the first time, and in a group setting, so that everyone can kind of join in on the party. In fact it's just a little strange to be watching a video of a live commentary of a set of films, perhaps one too many iterations removed from the actual first-hand experience to be completely involving. But the good news is that the MST3K guys have lost none of their impish brand of humor, and it's fully on display on this evening built around the madcap antics of Reefer Madness.

Rifftrax Live!: Reefer Madness Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

RiffTrax Live! Reefer Madness is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in both 1.33:1 and 1.78:1 (see the main body of the review above for details). There's nothing fantastic about this visual presentation, but I doubt few would be expecting great things from old public domain films. As mentioned above Reefer Madness is presented in one of its colorized editions, and a not very good colorized edition it is. The other shorts run the gamut from acceptable to very sharp (the contemporary animated ultra-shorts, in 1.78:1, being the best). The "live" footage of the RiffTrax team is a bit better, but due to some strange stage lighting the guys all look ghoulishly green and yellow some of the time, unless they were colorized by the same team who did Reefer Madness. Sharpness is okay, nothing more, but, really, are you coming to an offering like this expecting hi-def wonderment? Now that's funny.

Rifftrax Live!: Reefer Madness Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

RiffTrax Live! Reefer Madness features only a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mix, but as with the image quality, it's going to sound a little silly for anyone to go ballistic over this choice not to provide a lossless track, whether stereo or surround. The bulk of this outing is nothing other than three guys shouting smart-alecky comments at a screen with distorted, boxy and at times unintelligible soundtracks from days of yore, so what's to get that exercised over? This obviously is far from a state of the art soundtrack, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bother. The commentators' jokes are all easily discernable (at least when they're not talking over each other, which they have a tendency to do a few times), and you can make out most of what's being said in the shorts and Reefer Madness itself. The two things that seem to set off most lovers of high definition are DNR and the lack of lossless tracks, but in this case, I have to ask what more really would a lossless stereo track have offered here?

Rifftrax Live!: Reefer Madness Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements other than an "all new" intro by Mike, Kevin and Bill are offered.

Rifftrax Live!: Reefer Madness Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Scoring a release like this is a little difficult. Let's face it: Reefer Madness and the shorts accompanying it are such Grade Z fare our scoring system would need to be able to reflect negative numbers to really be able to handle an accurate representation of the actual worth of these works. But along with that is the camp value and unintended hilarity these films provide, which can't be easily dismissed. Add to that the derisive, occasionally scabrous, humor of the three commentators, and about the only way to average the score out is to toe the line somewhere in the middle. These new RiffTrax Live! Blu-rays aren't going to set any videophile or audiophile hearts on fire, but for some good, hearty laughs, they're hard to beat. Recommended.