Alice in Acidland

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")

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.

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.

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.

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!