Up in Smoke

First of the Cheech and Chong movies is probably the best overall, with the duo involved in a plot to drive a van constructed entirely of pot across the Mexican border into the US and featuring Cheech singing "Earache my Eye". Lots of laughs (especially for the "inspired" viewers), but definitely not for everyone. The whole movie revolves around drug use, so not a movie for young children, obviously. However, if you don't mind this, you'll probably laugh your you-know-what off.

Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) is an unemployed slacker who is his father's disappointment and threatened with military school. He drives off with his VW Beetle with the Rolls grill but his car breaks down. He is stranded until fellow weed smoker Pedro de Pacas (Cheech Marin) picks him up. Pedro is tripping on acid with his car parked on a traffic median. The cops arrest them. The guys get released when the judge is found to be drinking vodka. They visit Strawberry (Tom Skerritt) and barely escape the cops (Stacy Keach). Immigration comes to take Pedro's cousin and his wedding party to Mexico after he called them himself. His cousin just wanted a free ride to his wedding. The boys get deported as well. They stumble onto a secret weed factory and wrongly picks up a van constructed with weed.

This is filled with stoner jokes and some of them are hilarious. The guys are good together. I wish the movie is just the two guys hanging out together. The best scene is when the guys are out of their mind alone in their car. They don't actually need an outlandish plot. They really only need each other. The meandering plot is actually quite tiring. It's a downer to keep track of the story. I would think that their target audience shouldn't be asked to keep track of such a rambling mess. The movie devolves into a mess instead of simply having fun with the two guys.

This 1979 Paramount release introduced the controversial radio comedians Richard "Cheech" Marin and Thomas Chong to the screen for the first of six major film teamings and cameos together in several other films. This first teaming is the best teaming. The duo portray stoners who travel together on a road trip down to Tijuana on a mission to pick up a fresh new drug supply. However, they're being pursued by frantic cops all the way. A cult spoof classic and a film that began a new kind of wacky film comedy.

The counterculture was long dead and ripe for retrospective satire. Into the opportunity stepped two pro comics who after trying other things, built these characters. When comics work up a world for years and then brings it to a movie, it bodes well. Mike Myers would follow almost precisely this formula later with "Wayne's World."

The jokes are still pretty funny, many of them. Not the stuff with the flumoxxed cops or the folks who inadvertently get stoned (and get the munchies). But the bits of comic timing associated with the guys as if they were on stage.

Two bits to watch out for. One is two incidental women. The first has a scene only a minute long. A girl comes in, mistakes scouring powder for coke, snuffs it up and has the most comic facial expressions I have even seen on film. This is one of those priceless moments in film. I hope IMDb at some point figures out some means to vote on particular scenes. This girl would in life become an addict and a bag lady.

The second girl has a bigger role: Zane Buzby is one of the hippie stoner cheesecake babes that join the trip. She's got a less flashy role, but in ad libs created most of the situations in which she appears. She would go on to become one of TeeVee's most attuned comedy directors.

So you can see this as two stage personalities that are good, with these two women, who are also as good, surrounded by some disposable situations and jokes.

But there is another something interesting. The end of this comic show is a comic show within, the guys as a rock band in possibly the best Cheech and Chong sequence of all their movies. Everything from about 20 minutes into the film to this is a journey to this show, I suspect that "The Muppet Movie" of the following year was influenced by this.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Two stoners unknowingly smuggle a van -- made entirely of marijuana -- from Mexico to Los Angeles, with incompetent Sgt. Stedenko on their trail.

Although Cheech and Chong made several films together, they will probably always be best remembered for this one, their first. There are so many moments that have since become a part of pop culture. The use of War's "Low Rider", the smoking of the Labrador... when watching it for the first time you might feel like you have seen it before.

Those into drug culture may appreciate the film more, but being a stoner is certainly not required to laugh at the antics of these two luckless losers.