User reviews

The recent revival of Grindhouse-cinema (courtesy of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) thankfully brought some lost and presumed missing horror and exploitation gems of the late 60's and 70's back in to the spotlights, but inevitably it also helped bringing some awful and righteously forgotten stinkers to the surface. Some brand new DVD-label in my country – clearly inspired by the success and oddity value of Something Weird Video – even released this "Alice in Acidland" on disc and promoted it as a true highlight of the rancid exploitation era. Well, it isn't really. This is a terrible film, rapidly shot and edited together to further cash in on the huge success of other (and better) contemporary drug-movies like "The Trip" and "Head" and basically the LSD-version of the classic anti-propaganda joke "Reefer Madness". That particular 'documentary' – whether government funded or not – taught us that Marihuana is responsible for potentially intelligent teenagers to commit adultery, cause hit-and-run accidents, play with guns and even kill themselves. "Alice in Acidland" keeps it all a little sleazier and more easy-going, though. Apparently, all that LSD does is stimulating young and innocent girls to have random sex with strangers; whether guys that nickname themselves Animal or fellow naughty girls. As you can guess, "Alice in Acidland" is merely just an excuse to show a series of gratuitous soft-porn sequences and delirious color-effects. The set-up is similar to the one of "Reefer Madness", with a voice-over narration from a psychiatrist and the poor intoxicated Alice herself. That is kind of weird, since the end of the movie clearly states that the LSD messed up poor Alice beyond repair, so how would she be able to narrate her version? There's absolutely no dialog in the entire film, presumable to save the viewer some really terrible performances, but the ladies are quite luscious and keep the sex footage at least endurable. 55 minutes might seem incredibly short for a long feature film, but believe you me, in the case of "Alice in Acidland" is more than long enough and perhaps even a bit overlong.

The first part of this film is extraordinarily inept. It has a voice-over instead of dialogue, and tells the tale of a college girl who smokes marijuana and becomes a crazed lesbian. At the end of the film she drops acid and has a full-colour lesbian fantasy, that inevitably drives her insane. The wild lesbian fantasy is not too badly done, and requires extensive use of the pause button.

The college students Alice and Kathy are invited to a pool party by the lesbian Frieda. Alice gets drunk and uses acid and does not feel well. Frieda takes a bath with Alice and they have a lesbian relationship. Alice joins a group of hippies, uses acid and drugs with them and has sex with every man and woman in orgies.

"Alice in Acidland" is among the worse (if not the worst) films I have ever seen. This boring and annoying film is complete garbage, from the writer and director to the cast and crew. Poorly shot associated to bad acting, and even the naked women are not worthwhile watching since they are fat and flaccid "actresses". The exploitation is ridiculous, with the men wearing shorts while shagging the women. The message is trash, without scientific basis, and only a pretext for a cheap exploitation. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Alice na Terra dos Ácidos" ("Alice in Acidland")

Alice in Acidland: 2/10: Filmed with only narration and a jazz soundtrack that sounds like a lot of bad smack was involved Alice in Acidland is your Daddy's porn.

There is no acid per see in the first two thirds of Alice in fact the girls become lesbian potheads with a few drinks of rum. This is basically an old black and white bump and grind shoot. It contains a fairly unattractive cast, pretentious narration, missing characters let alone scenes, mind numbingly boring sex and a plot out of a C-grade Quincy episode.

My favorite scene an unnamed girl in a group shot looks directly into the camera with a true deer in headlight stare gets her direction shouted at her does something for thirty seconds then forgets and stares at the camera again.

Of course 1968 was a long time ago and this was a one-off for most of the cast. So sit back and ask yourself one question. "Honey the second lesbian isn't that Mrs. Peterson from our church?"

Alice in Acidland is a waste of time. More than forty of the movie's sixty-seven minutes are spent building up to the point where Alice drops the LSD. These minutes can easily be spent with the vcr on fast-forward. There's little dialogue, but a lot of needless porn. It doesn't get much better once Alice drops the LSD and the film changes from black and white to color. About the only interesting thing about this film is noting the vocal lines that have been sampled by musicians.

Some say "Alice in Acidland" is a bad film, and while they're right--the pornography that comprises half to most of the picture is exceedingly dull and not particularly filmed well--in another sense, this is innovative filmmaking. It's as though someone found a silent stag film and decided to add two voiceover narrator tracts, one a cautionary tale from a supposed psychiatrist and the other from the Alice protagonist, along with minimal sound effects, to sell it as a self-contradictory narrative feature on the exploitation film circuit à la "Reefer Madness" (1936). A so-good-it's-bad tale that pretends to advocate and educate against the so-called evils of drugs and sex (including the lesbian variety, as depicted with copious amounts of nudity in this one), but, in fact, celebrates those very activities and can be quite laughable in the process. On top of all that, we get a final ten minutes of psychedelic art in color (as opposed to the rest of the picture's black and white) seemingly from a film student with access to an optical printer and the illicit substances the film warns us about. This is what cinema is all about: taking disparate materials and editing them together into something original and at least semi-coherent.

The "Alice in Wonderland" connection is a nice touch, too. The male narrator tells us this acid trip is no fairy tale, but here's a young woman named Alice going down the rabbit holes of drug and sex parties, led astray by the White Rabbit of her lesbian professor, meeting (and mating) a (sex) "animal," smoking as much as the hookah-fixated Caterpillar and otherwise ingesting as much as Lewis Carroll's Alice did magical mushrooms and other desserts, until the entire edifice crumbles like a deck of cards around her. No fairy tale for children, sure, but there's no pretending that drug and sex parties aren't the fantasies of every other mature viewer. Once again, the film tells us one thing, but shows us another.

In this boring 1960s exploitation/ education flick, a lesbian invites two girls to an LSD party by the pool, which results in everybody getting stoned and getting laid.

Flick rails against LSD use and hedonistic sex, but then exploits it as much as possible: most of the girls were a bit heavy and homely during black-and-white (sober) portions of film, but after LSD was taken, film switches to bright, vibrant, vivid colour, and they become hot nymphs, banging guys brains out, the LSD adding a tiny little thrill to their dull grey lives. Until the very end, when the leading lady ends up in a padded cell, in a straightjacket! Film switches to colour during Alice's trip; the black-and-white scenes look like bad home movies of the day, while the colour scenes look like generic '60s LSD-inspired filming of nothing in particular.

No credited cast or crew, was this an attempt to give the film a realistic feel, trying to make the viewer forget that they were watching a movie? Or were they all just too embarrassed to have their names associated with this thing?

Ultimately, the word 'END' appears drawn on a female caricature's ass.

This is a kind of spoof of Reefer Madness. I hope they got govt funding for this, that would have been a great joke. This is on the surface a movie warning you against the dangers of doing drugs. There are two things which belie that. One, there's an awful lot of nudity in it, like half the screen time. Two, supposedly Alice does the voice over but at the end she's shown to have lost her mind because of drug use, so how can she do the voice-over.

The other problem is the lead. While Alice might've been a beauty from afar, she's far from beautiful. She's chubby, very much so, even by the standards of 1968, since the other girls are at least NOT chubby. Fair's fair, the men are also chubby, and rather unappealing too.

Plus, these women look way too old. The lesbian partner of Frida looks not a day under 38, and the other 'school' girls all look 25.

I bet in 1968, this could have been arousing, but now? Not so much.

And I take offense to the phrase "a known lesbian". As if being a lesbian is a crime! 40 years ago, you say? We don't do that anymore, you say? What do you think about:

• "in a COMMITTED gay relationship" and

• "openly homosexual" and

• "gay LIFESTYLE" ???

this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal (i.e. how the men have sex with their slacks on, which I do as well). the parties look like any other raging party in the 60's where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate having sex with everyone as soon as they walk in. i also want to compliment the editor on his jump cuts to build up the tension, very french new wave. i enjoyed the cut about a minute into the film where it cuts from one scene to another in the middle of a sentence but i have to say my favorite cut is during one of the many drawn out sex scenes, it suddenly cuts to a girl lying on the floor with no top, while all the men in the room are ignoring her and the voices over says something like "...lost her virginity." i don't normally rate movies so high, but this movie deserves to be on the top 250!

Another really great Something Weird Video. Made 1968, Alice in Acidland is part LSD scare film and part psychidelic trip film. It's actually really swell. The first half that shows `Alice' as a naïve girl, who gets invited to a pool party. While there she gets drunk for the first time and then has a bath with the female host of the party. After that first encounter Alice becomes apart of that hip group. She frequents these orgy parties and meets Animal. The orgy scenes and the nudity are really tasteful and very pin-up like. At one party a new girl who wants to be apart of the group takes acid and then is raped by Animal. Alice takes acid afterwards, even though she was totally aware of what happened to her friend. After reflecting on the disturbing event that her friend suffered she trips hard. Much like Wizard of OZ, Alice in Acidland turns from black and white to full psychidelic color. There are a lot of super-imposed images of her friend and a lot of Alice dancing nude with patters and colors projected on her. I found the whole movie to be interesting to watch. The black and white half was shot well for the time and actually looks better than some later films. The tripping scene was very much like an opening sequence for a James Bond movie. It was traditionally psychidelic, not really intense like Psyched by the 4-D Witch. In the end a lesson is supposed to be learned. But who knows, it looked sort of fun.

This movie was made highlighting sexual promiscuity and drugs and it attempts to be serious with a harsh narrative. It follows through in a somewhat neutral yet unforgiving attitude towards these young people's situation. This late 1960's time period movie is viewed in a way as to portray very destructive tendencies of unfortunately drug-seduced people. I believe the show is very graphic and intense and is made this way in order to argue the point of where substances abuse leads to. The film has very attractive women playing the roles and produces an image of youths who are reckless with their judgement. This movie occurs supposedly in an era before there were less inhibitions and when most women were not as casual yet about their sex life. There is a story development making it easy to watch but it is not a kind story although it gives the viewers a concerned feeling for dope's victims. I was disturbed that this was shown without including a possibility for a second chance for victims. The quality of resolution used in the filming was lower and typical of this period so it almost looked like there was a grey fog of cigarette smoke in the air. This is a show with a straightforward message that may be offensive to you by the use of radical and explicit subject matter.

At its root, the filmmaker's dilemma has two fangs.

One challenge is to take things that people know and bend and filter them in ways that can be seen as "natural" when it gets to the other side, past the set, the film, the beam, the retina, the neurons. In other words, most filmmakers struggle with us to show us what we know.

On the other hand, some filmmakers attempt to show us what we don't know, or think we know but have never seen. Possibly love falls in this category, but that's another story. The challenge of this game is developing a vocabulary to take us to the unfamiliar, using bits and pieces of a vocabulary from the familiar.

Its the first challenge that the theatrical types love: truth, passion and all that. But its the second that fascinates me, at least this week.

In this "other world" category are the standard parade of movies about mathematics, mysticism, afterdeath, art (sometimes), or mental deviance (when we get the first person view). Oddly, the same conventions are usually used for all of these, making many of these possibly the worst films in existence.

And then there are the hallucinogenic drug movies. These are fascinating. I might make a special study of these, starting before the period when some significant number of viewers actually could be counted on to be experienced in this regard.

If you were to start such a study, dear viewer, you need to start with "Easy Rider," "Head" and this, all made in the same year.

This one is in a different camp from the others because it chooses a sexual metaphor. The story is contrived to set us up by establishing a sexually driven trace, a call into the viewer's mind to memories that we all have about transit to another world while having sex.

I'm really impressed by the idea. We do end up with all the standard bumph of colored lights on bodies, not much different than say the psychedelic scenes in "Behind the Green Door," which used the same sex and psychedelic formula. Except by that time filmmakers were showing penetration.

"Green Door" takes a slightly different formula than here: the story is about a movie of a show. This Alice case is instead a different type of show: a documentary, a warning, along the lines of "Reefer Madness."

By the way, people laugh at "Reefer Madness," thinking it an inept, stodgy piece of misinformed propaganda. Look again folks and see that it is constructed according to a strictly psychedelic model, obviously by someone who knew. Its a "Saragossa Manuscript" in mufti.

Okay, back to this. There is no reason to watch it unless you are into these things, these cinematic challenges. But if you are interested in film, and other worlds, try this concoction of visual science fiction as charmed up by entranced lesbian sex.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Alice in Acidland (1969)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

How "entertained" you are by this 55-minute nudie will be determined by how badly you need to see nudity. Alice (Sheri Jackson) is taken to a pool party by her friend Frieda and it turns out that this party is being hosted by a lesbian. Not only is a lesbian hosting the party but she's serving up alcohol and weed, all of which are things that our young Alice has never tried. Soon the beautiful teen heads down the dangerous world of sex and drugs. Take out the nudity and ALICE IN ACIDLAND would be just like those exploitation pictures from the 1930s. Films like REEFER MADNESS, SEX MADNESS and THE COCAINE FIENDS are exactly what this movie is going for but of course the biggest difference is that this one here has wall-to-wall nudity. If you're just being released from an unknown country and haven't been able to get access to any sort of nudity then you might be entertained by this thing. All others are going to be bored out of their minds because outside the nudity there's really nothing going on here. Heck, even the nudity itself gets boring after a while even at just 55-minutes. The biggest problem is that there's really no sort of story going on here as we just get random scenes of people doing drugs or making out. The film's "story" is told via narration and this too gets very boring after a while. The title and poster art makes you think that you're getting into something wild but even by 1969 standards this thing is dull. The film's B&W images turn to color for the final ten-minutes but this doesn't add anything.