Nobody else seems to know how to make a hilarious, easy-going film like Up In Smoke, and if this effort is any indication, it would appear that the duo don't really know it either. In fact, if I had to assess why Up In Smoke was such a classic in spite of its uneven pace, Still Smokin' would lead me to believe that it was purely a miraculous accident. But even without comparison to Up In Smoke, Still Smokin' is by any standard a complete mess.
The concept around which the film is based seems interesting enough. The stoner duo, playing themselves for a change, are invited to a film festival in Holland. The idea being that Holland, with its somewhat less Nancy-Boy approach to drug consumption, regards the pair as celebrities. Or at least, that is the idea behind one of the sketches. And this is where the problem begins. The plot, such as it is, loosely ties together a series of Comedy Company-style sketches that just don't work. Some of them, such as the interview with an adoring Dutch film critic society, smack of self-indulgence.
The one part of this film that comes close to working is the blind blues harmonica player. Chong literally comes onto the stage wearing some kind of brown paint over his face, and, tapping out a beat with his foot, blows into his empty hands. It is a lot funnier to watch than it looks on paper (or a monitor), and I still cannot watch a lot of Charles Bronson's scenes in C'era una volta il West without cracking up because of it. If the rest of the film had been like this, it would have been a major success.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film is based around such idiocies as a wrestling match with invisible opponents that goes on way too long, or a stage performance in which the stoner duo impersonate dogs. I can't remember if they really do such things as sniff each others' butts, but given how low and undignified this sounds in text form, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. What would surprise me would be the Paramount executives being fully sober and lucid when they greenlighted this mess. Seriously, did they even have a finished script when principal photography began?
In all, I gave Still Smokin' a one out of ten. It is not bad enough to be good, but it is bad enough to be just plain bad. Aside from the one funny skit I outlined above, the entire film was, and still is, a big waste of cash. I am not surprised in the slightest that the Just Say No movement picked up momentum shortly after films like this. They suggest quite strongly that marijuana might not be so harmless after all.
