This is the third Cheech and Chong film, coming after Up in Smoke (1978) and Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (1980). The films are a series in the traditional way--characters continue, and there is something of a linear development per the films' chronologies of the characters, but as with the plot of this film in isolation, the threads holding it all together are pretty thin.
In Nice Dreams, Cheech and Chong are selling dope from a barely disguised ice cream truck. They may have struck it rich by this point, or maybe Cheech just doesn't know how to read numbers very well. At any rate, they do not seem to be hurting for money--they have a bag of it, after all, which they have to pursue later in the film--and somehow, they're living in a very expensive, big house on the beach outside of Los Angeles, although it seems that maybe they're just crashing at a friend of a friend's place while he's away (he's a musician on tour).
A lot of it is pretty unclear, because the last thing that Cheech and Chong as writers and director (only Chong in the latter case) are concerned with is telling anything like a traditional story. Instead, it seems like maybe they were high while they wrote and filmed this. That's usually meant as a negative--the idea is to denote how little sense the work makes, or how little coherence it has. I don't mean it that way here. I don't mean it as a knock, necessarily. I mean it literally, and consequently to underscore a kind of stream-of-consciousness, absurdist and surreal flow. Those can all be very positive qualities, as they are occasionally here. But maybe Cheech and Chong were just looking for the easiest way to string together a number of sketch ideas, and not enough sketch ideas, because some of them are drawn out or reprised past their freshness date. And that probably goes for the whole premise of Cheech and the Man (Chong) selling dope and getting into wacky situations while being pursued by Sgt. Stedanko (Stacy Keach). Nice Dreams feels too much like Cheech and Chong are just coasting--vamping while waiting for the next soloist to start. Although I love experimentation as much as anyone else, this is a film that would have benefited from a stronger focus on telling a story in a traditional way. I don't always think that something different is better just because it's different.
So this is definitely a step down from the first two films, although there are more than enough funny moments to keep a fan of the first two films mildly entertained, and most of the supporting actors, including the returning ones, are enjoyable and had even more potential. Some skits (that word fits here better than "scenes"), like the crazy house and the fiasco at Donna's apartment, and even the "Save the Whales" song, are as good as most of the material in the first two films. But overall, it just seems like their hearts, and maybe their heads, weren't as much into making a film this time around.
