Nice Dreams

Cheech and Chong run an ice cream business called Nice Dreams, which actually is a cover for them to sell their special blend of dope. Soon after reaching a considerable amount of cash they decide to retire for a relaxing life on their own island with all the girls they want. But before this dream can become reality, they have to elude the cops led by the Sarge Stedanko who will stop at nothing to get their hands on them. All of this leads to many unplanned confrontations and actions that don't always workout for the best.

The third film of the series is a really spaced-out stoner comedy (even more so then the first two flicks) from the comical duo Cheech and Chong. This one is more spaced-out because it throws in some surreal moments into fodder. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two outings, sure nothing will beat the memorable "Up In Smoke", but I thought they slightly out did themselves here compared to their previous outing "Next Movie" and that could be attributed to Stacy Keach returning as Sarge Stedanko too. It was great to see that Sarge and his man are on the trail again. Though, I wish there was a bit more screen time for Keach.

Everything about this one seems more silly and absurd, especially the scenes involving how anyone, or anything that smokes their strong weed will turn into a lizard. The whole concept is purely stoner humour! The film doesn't have much in a way of narrative, but more so comical episodes. But that's what you expect anyway. Something is always happening with Cheech and Chong getting in all sorts of mayhem and also meeting buoyant and irregular characters along the way. One of those characters involves a whacked out doctor and Paul Ruben's performance as Howie Hamburger Dude adds to the laughs too. The humour is required taste, definitely. It throws in many sexual and drug related gags. Sure, some of the jokes and gimmicks are crude, messy, coarse and fall flat, but the pair works off each other perfectly well with their fluid timing that you seem to let it all go. They alone can carry a film. It moves along rather quickly, which helps considerably too and there's a well-booted and spicy soundtrack to keep the energy levels high. Also I loved the ironic ending to their dream life. The script might be filled with low-brow lines, but still you got some clever wit and pointless rambles that are engaging enough, if moronic in vibe. It's not terribly perfect as a whole, but there are enough spirited and unpredictable sketches (like the nut-house and acid trip scene and those ones involving the incompetent police) and performances to overlook these failures. From what I hear and read, people usually rate this one as their second best feature and I tend to agree.

Incredibly stupid, but I got a kick out of it nonetheless. It's an enjoyably crazy romp from the beginning to the end. A definite must for the fans.

Cheech and Chong's first movie, Up in Smoke (1978), was the most successful and it set the scene for the five other films which were to follow. Nice Dreams (1981) is movie number three.

Nice Dreams is a very good film for laid-back old hippies like me who enjoy romanticising the 70s. Gone are the flower-power days of the 60s and life seems to have degenerated into sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, and this movie has its fair share of each.

My favourite scene is at the Chinese restaurant where Chong is mistaken for Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. And then there is a welcome cameo appearance from the enigmatic LSD guru Dr Timothy Leary.

One of my favourite supporting roles is the police sergeant who has the tongue of a lizard and believes "the only way to catch a doper is for you yourself to become a smoker."

The quirky soundtrack and slapstick comedy helps to keep the movie moving along nicely...

Even though Cheech and Chong sold millions of records in the 70s and had a major success with Up in Smoke, I would not call Nice Dreams a mainstream movie. I would suggest it is a movie with a cult following although I've never seen it on any "cult film" lists.

If you like this movie you may also like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Withnail and I".

I swear when I'd watched Nice Dreams in 1994 I'd assessed it rather silly to my taste due the offering touches in a neuralgic matter at my generation on the eighties deeply devasted by those smoke and white dust on their lives, nowadays as ripened brain revisiting this uncanny funny comedy I manage split the subject of the main preposition that make you laugh upon a countless gags concerning two weirdo guys selling marijuana covered as ace cream.

The duo comics guys already had started in a successful thematic comedy in UP IN SMOKE, CHEECH AND CHONG"S NEXT MOVIE, in fact anytime they didn't logged out of those smokey characters whatsoever, they pursued in this track until the topic was utterly sapped, so Nice Dreams worthwhile take a look for tons of hilarious sequences, mixing a slight sexploitation orientation and the wacko guys around, as the fruit cop character Noodles (Tim Rossovich) often groping Detective Drooler at surveillance at night shift, what a priceless moment.

Beware when it reaches on the highlight sequence at panoramic elevator a naked Cheech in dire straits running from the menacing "Animal", so get yourself ready to see a mocking of those wild times which smoke and sniff were meaning of forbidden things, otherwise on current time quite normal, Cheech & Chong are unforgettable indeed, unfortunately just a couple of pictures were released on DVD in Brazil.

Thanks for reading.

Resume:

First watch: 1994 / How many: 3 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.5.

This is probably Cheech and Chong's best movie. My daughters often ask me (well maybe not often, but once in a while) which one I think is funnier: Cheech or Chong? My answer is always the same: Chong is funnier, but Cheech is a better actor. This movie is a great example. These guys are very talented and very funny. I talk to people my age (the bottom rung of the Baby Boomer generation) and they still think of C&C as two burn-outs that made some movies. Do people think that Charlie Chaplin walked around with a tiny mustache and a cane? Did Jerry Lewis walk around knocking glasses over? They're actors. Maybe their movies weren't always the best, but C&C are two of the greats. And "Nice Dreams" is one of their best.

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.