by Martin Anderson at Den of Geek!
n.b. This list is about scenes in movies where the effects of drug-taking are depicted. Therefore you won’t find the likes of 2001: A Space Oddyssey or Eraserhead here…
50: Bloodsuckers (1970)
Feckless Oxbridge luminary Patrick Mower ends up with a bunch of drug-taking, daylight-loving vampires on a Greek island. Unless you’re a big fan of Imogen Hassall (not unreasonable), the following trip/orgy sequence represents the only entertainment to be extracted from this interminable early 70s Euro-pudding. This sequence was one of many casualties of an almost random pruning of the film in order to obtain a broader certification in Europe, though it remains in many American versions…
49: The 25th Hour (2002)
Anna Paquin enjoys a loaded glide round a swinging nightclub in Spike Lee’s under-regarded love-letter to redemption and to the twin towers. Though not achieved by the same method, some of these shots seem to be a tribute to the self-filming ‘strap-on camera’ technique developed by Martin Scorsese for Mean Streets…
48: From Hell (2001)
Psychic detective John Abeline uses his opium-induced dreams to find clues to the identity and whereabouts of Jack The Ripper in this atmospheric adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. In the first of the sequences John Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’) makes his first big-screen appearance since David Lynch’s 1980 biopic.
47: Chopper (2003)
Andrew Dominik’s hugely entertaining – and hugely violent – biopic of Australian hard man ‘Chopper’ Read features an amusing editing technique to explain the hyper-aware state engendered by cocaine-use….
46: Superman 3 (1983)
It would be a big mistake to look for much subtext in a movie this dumb, but the scene in the junkyard where ‘Evil Superman’ splits off from Clark Kent and fights him has always struck me as a trippy and symbolic representation of Supie’s inner conflict rather than a genuine stand-up fight. The drug that’s reduced our hero to this is Richard Pryor’s tar-laced synthetic Kryptonite…
45: Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Utterly abandoned to corruption, drugs and booze, Harvey Keitel’s super-conflicted anti-hero is prone to visions, and a moment of great sorrow in a church brings Christ himself into the picture…
44: Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith strike out of the Clerks universe into…the world of Scooby Doo. In all but name anyway; the patently obvious ‘mystery machine’ that rescues our stranded heroes has the whole gang inside, even if they are rather more foul-mouthed and bickering than usual. Mewes spreads the mellowness around with some rather naughty ‘Dooby Snacks’, and pretty soon they’re all getting along famously. Then the dog starts talking…
43: Dune (1984)
David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978) isn’t in this list because, in spite of its compelling nightmarish imagery, no drugs are actually taken in the film. Nor are they in Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), which nonetheless refines Eraserhead‘s bizarre visuals yet further in a number of dream sequences. In Dune, Lynch builds yet further on the grotesque and stylised dream-imagery which defined his early career; the ‘Spice Melange’ is a potent and rare drug that gives the user psychic insight and strange powers, and the ‘Water Of Life’ its most distilled form – fatal to all men except the prophesied ‘Kwisatz Haderach’. But Paul Atreides (Kyle McLachlan) must try some to find out if he is that long-awaited man…
42: Things Are Tough All Over (1982)
Arch-tokers Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong have contributed too much drug-fuelled cinematic lunacy to be allowed more than one entry in this list. Here they arrive at a posh restaurant having partaken of certain substances, and find themselves doing as much gender-bending as mind-bending…
41: The Acid House (1998)
Irvine Welsh continues to expound on the secret narcotic life of urban Scotland. The film is vaguely considered to be a descendent of Trainspotting but did not attract the same acclaim, perhaps partly because of the anthological nature of the three stories it tells. In the eponymous segment, Ewen Bremner gets stuck on the magic roundabout and some typical trip-out SFX…
40: Spiderman (2001)
Some radioactive venom sends Peter Parker on a trip through every beloved but cheap Sam Raimi trick in the book in the first of the hugely successful series….
39: Batman Begins (2005)
Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow uses a powerful weaponised hallucinogen to drive his victims into paroxyms of fear in Christopher Nolan’s warm-up for The Dark Knight…
38: Casino Royale (2006)
Bond gets slipped a nasty and quick-acting poison in Daniel Craig’s entry to the Bond canon and has to resort to some unreliable hi-tech MI6 jump-starting to keep his heart going. This is exactly the kind of innovation that managed to make Casino Royale such a stunning Bond film while keeping to the spirit of the character, traits largely missing from Quantum Of Solace…
37: Barbarella (1968)
Having discovered ‘real’ sex in her recent adventures, space-twit Barbarella is disappointed to find that the promisingly-named Dildano (David Hemmings) wants to unite with her the more traditional – chemical – way of the 41st century. Referred to only as ‘the pill’, the fictional drug that the pair take in order to share a psychosexual experience is a clear parody of the birth control drug that was revolutionising the 1960s, and it certainly looks like a smoking-hot experience…
36: Skidoo (1968)
Otto Preminger’s by-the-numbers gangster flick has little to make it stand out from the crowd apart from one scene where imprisoned gangster Jackie Gleason drops a little acid in his cell. This is just about as absurd an example of how button-down America envisioned an LSD experience as Hollywood has to offer…
35: Training Day (2001)
Ethan Hawke ends up landed with the new-boss-from-hell as the would-be narcotics cop learning some very bad lessons from ultra-hard, ultra-corrupt veteran Denzel Washington. Goaded to ‘man up’ by sampling the PCP that they are hunting down, Hawke goes green, as does the cinematography in this rather nauseous sequence. To add insult to injury, Washington then confesses that he has never tried anything that lethal himself…
34: The Weird World of LSD (1967)
A purportedly anti-LSD movie that boasts the same hypocritical remit that let Russ Meyer ‘preach and show’ in the 1960s, Weird World attempts to convey the full depth of a series of LSD experiences entirely in black and white. Since trip-sequences are 75% SFX, this is not a project you would really want to undertake on a budget as restricted as this…
33: Hannibal (2001)
An unrecognisable Gary Oldman plays trust-funded sex offender Mason Verger in Ridley Scott’s sequel to Silence Of The Lambs. In this scene he explains to Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) how Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) used a popper to persuade him to slice his own face off with a mirror so that our ‘hero’ could feed it to Verger’s dogs. “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”
32: Starsky & Hutch (2004)
Straight-laced Starsky (Ben Stiller) mistakes a bag of ultra-pure cocaine for sugar in this affectionate comic re-tread of the 70s show. Pretty soon his inhibitions are history, and he’s dragging laid-back crooner Hutch (Owen Wilson) to a disco show-down reminiscent of the ‘face-off’ in Zoolander…
31: Hanna Barbera anti-drugs spot (1970)
At a time when America’s animators were grooving on the psychedelic vibe (check out Aristocats), there was clearly some disparity between the anti-drugs remit of whoever commissioned this and the enthusiasm of the animators involved, who render the film an irresistible advertisement for LSD. There’s even a tussle with some zombies at the end…
30: Spun (2002)
Speed-freak Jason Schwartzman hooks up with ‘cook’ Mickey Rourke and king-pin Eric Roberts for this dissolute but energetic tale of tweakers looking to fill up the hours of their empty lives. Some of the techniques used to depict being high are a tribute to the rather basic lens effects of the late 60s and early 70s…
29: Gothic (1986)
Ken Russell was a predictable but apposite choice of director to bring to life the opium-filled night at Lake Geneva that inspired the authoress to write Frankenstein. The most memorable trip-imagery from the film is surely the Dali-esque moment that Myriam Cyr’s nipples turn into eyes…
NSFW
28: Liquid Sky (1982)
Thrill-seeking aliens land on top of the apartment of a heroin-addicted New York drug dealer and themselves become murderously hooked on the human pheromones released during orgasm. Probably the weirdest set-up of any genre-exploitation film of the 1980s, and the producers didn’t spare us any ropey SFX on the trip sequences either…
27: Reefer Madness (1936)
This most famous of anti-drug propaganda films portrays the effects of cannabis as including violent psychoses and jumping out of windows. The grand guignol flavour of this and companion piece Sex Madness was famously parodied in the post-credits sequence of John Landis’ Amazon Women On The Moon (1983)…
26: Killing Zoe (1994)
Some strobing effects and warped camera effects characterise the almost-instant descent into heroin and crime experienced by Eric Stoltz’s newcomer in Paris in Roger Avary’s near-miss…
Continued from The Top 50 trips in movies
25: Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Darren Aronofsky captures the tenderness of his doped-out characters in some of the psychedelic imagery of this hard-hitting and ultimately very glum view of drug abuse. Here he uses that most psychedelic of real-life constructions, a pier (a blocked road that extends over the ocean but cannot take you anywhere) to signify the characters’ longing to escape the mundanity of existence, and the impossibiliy of their ever doing so…
24: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Matt Dillon is the disaffected leader of a nomadic, drug-addicted clan robbing drugstores to survive and get high in the early 1970s. The breakthrough film for Gus Van Sant, it features an unlikely cameo from William S. Burroughs (as a proselytising priest) and some classically surreal trip-imagery including flying houses, bicycles and cows…
23: Shrooms (2006)
With one of the best taglines (‘Get ready to get wasted’) and posters of the year, it’s a shame there’s so little new ground broken in Paddy Breathnach’s slasher. Lindsey Haun is the cheerleader-level head of a party of holidaying US students who head to Ireland to partake of psilocybin but end up being slaughtered in the backwoods. A lot of the drug imagery is standard J-horror stuff, but one exceptional scene finds a shroomer having a rather antagonistic conversation with a cow…
22: The Salton Sea (2002)
D.J. Caruso’s tale of detective work among the tweakers of Southern California has such an inconsistent tone that it ultimately made little impression. It’s alternately as funny and baffling as Memento and as devoted to outright comedy as Tarantino at the height of his powers, but unfortunately it doesn’t gel as a whole. The arguable gem of the movie is this early explanation of the history of crystal meth, and particularly its effect on Japanese kamikaze pilots, bored housewives and JFK…
21: Saving Grace (2000)
Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole helms Craig Ferguson’s tale of a woman (Brenda Blethyn) who naively turns to peddling cannabis in order to make a living. At one point she decides that she can’t sell something she has never tried, so it’s off to the seaside with Mr. Ferguson for a quick taster…
20: Bobby (2006)
Emilio Estevez directed and starred in this off-beat story of the day prior to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The film dips in and out of the lives of the various residents at Kennedy’s hotel, and at one point accompanies a couple of his campaign staff on a journey into LSD-land. Which just goes to show that you should never open a wardrobe just in your underpants – Nixon might be in there…
19: A Very Brady Sequel (1996)
Up-to-no-good Tim Matheson gets accidentally served with spaghetti where the sauce has been made out of the psilocybin mushrooms he had stashed away. The subsequent trip and music video ‘Good Morning Sunshine’ is a hoot…
18: Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Vietnam vet Tim Robbins is suffering a more-than-usually nasty case of PTSS. Having been experimented on with a violence-inducing drug during his tour, monsters and apparitions can appear in his view at a moment’s notice…
17: Young Guns (1988)
Emilio Estevez , Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips lose their pragmatic attitude to survival when they share some Peyote round the campfire with a tribal elder. The sound-work is particularly effective in these scenes…
16: The Doors (1990)
Oliver Stone approached his biopic of the controversial rock band as a visceral and sensual experience rather than a rote chronology of events in the life of Jim Morrison. Though not to all critics’ tastes, it’s stood the test of time, and the fairly rare psychedelic SFX are put to good use, as in this scene where Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) channels the Serpent out in the desert…
15: Midnight Cowboy (1969)
I wish I could go back to 1968 and harshly reprimand the Colonel for not letting Elvis do this movie. Nevertheless, Jon Voigt deservedly won plaudits and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the hapless wannabe gigolo lost in the impersonal cynicism of early 70s New York. When some passing Warhol-clones dig Voigt’s cowboy look, he gets invited to a psyched-out loft happening among the effete literati of Manhattan. This sequence is arguably the best of many that attempted to capture the emotional disassociation of the dying counter-culture of the late 60s…
14: Trainspotting (1996)
Possibly the most iconic film of the 1990s; writer Irvine Welsh and director Danny Boyle will bend any visual or narrative rule in order to make jaws drop, and the ‘toilet diving’ scene for Ewan McGregor’s lost suppository is one of the most revolting yet strangely beautiful sequences of surreal cinema. But if anything burns itself ineffably onto the viewer’s subconscious, it will be Renton’s bad ‘comedown’ and the wall-climbing, head-turning baby…
13: The Trip (1968)
Cult king Roger Corman lost no time exploiting the mania for psychedlic imagery, and Peter Fonda is the TV commercial director who finds himself on a trippy rite-of-passage in Hollywood’s sunset strip. To save on costly SFX, Corman used imaginative editing of shots of the neon and environs of Sunset Strip to simulate the psychedelic LSD experience.
12: Masque Of The Red Death (1964)
In this classic example of low-gore terror, the devil-worshipping Morgana (Hazel Court) seeks an early communion with satan in order to impress her straying lover and master Prince Prospero (Vincent Price). The devilish potion she drinks brings on a stylised fantasy-meeting with a series of nightmarish demons. I can’t find a video of this sequence, but at 1m 32s into this trailer, you’ll see some excerpts from it.
11: Naked Lunch (1991)
William S. Burroughs’ original novel was considered unfilmable, but David Cronenberg’s attempt to render it is an interesting failure at worst. When bug-exterminator Peter Weller follows his wife into addiction to the pesticide he uses, reality begins to fracture and Weller finds himself in a delusional ‘spy world’ similar to that of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Talking (literally) assholes and cockroach/typewriter hybrids aren’t things you’re going to see in most movies…
10: American Beauty (1999)
Kevin Spacey’s adoring obsession with Mena Suvari- in Sam Mendes’ tribute to the beauty we fail to notice – combines with his new-found love of cannabis to produce some of the most beautiful stoned imagery of the nineties….
9: Easy Rider (1969)
The accidental exposure of some of the film stock explains some of the psychedelic effects in the New Orleans ‘trip’ sequence of Dennis Hopper’s ground-breaking counterculture classic. There’s a lot of frantic editing, stock mixing and general abreaction as Hopper, Fonda, Karen Black and Toni Basil work their way through a painfully bad trip…
8: Alice in Wonderland (1951)
A lot of the lexicon and iconography of drug culture developed directly from Lewis Carroll’s supposedly innocent fairy tale. A girl takes a mushroom and finds herself up against talking rabbits? Do us a favour. In this clip, more appropriate music has been inserted (not by us)…
7: Performance (1970)
Donald Cammell’s film – now considered a visual milestone for cinematographer Nick Roeg – segues from Guy Ritchie-style gangland London to the dissolute abode of fading rock star Mick Jagger, who passes his days in an abstract intellectual haze with an under-dressed female retinue. Central gangster figure James Fox researched the heavy stuff among the mobsters of London, but then overdid it by actually trying out psychedelic drug Dimethyltryptamine during production (one of the factors attributed to his subsequent nervous breakdown and long rest from acting, finally broken with A Passage To India in 1984). Fox’s acid trip is one of the central scenes of the film, but you’ll have to check out the DVD to see it. Meantime here’s an unlikely juxtaposition of hippy rock and hard men from the movie’s oft-changed ending…
6: A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel posits a future world where the new hallucinogen Substance D is over-running the country. Keanu Reeves is about as undercover as a cop can get in his pursuit of the bad guys, since he wears a ‘scramble suit’ that totally obfuscates his identity. Trouble is, he’s getting rather fond of Substance D himself, and the entire film is permeated with psychedelic imagery, courtesy not only of Dick’s writing but the semi-animated stylisation…
5: The Matrix (1999)
Though the blue pill taken by Neo (Keanu Reeves) is merely symbolic, it’s a real drug with very real side-effects and consequences for him. What’s creepy about Neo’s ‘wake-up’ scene is the lag between taking the pill and the onset of the effects, which are as frighteningly invasive and irresistible as any more conventional ‘bad trip’…
4: Altered States (1981)
Ken Russell restrained his eccentric style for his adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s mind-bending novel of chemical atavism. Until the ‘trip’ sequences. Scientist William Hurt is determined to explore the recesses of his own mind using chemicals and isolation tanks, but one of his early dabblings is with Peyote in Mexico, where he undergoes a truly visionary trip…
3: Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
Only Terry Gilliam could have done justice to Hunter S. Thompson’s autobiographical tale of debauchery and drug-induced madness whilst on a reporting mission to the gambling city. The movie is so awash with drug-induced imagery that you could present almost any section of it as an example. Here Thompson (Johnny Depp) heads off to a concert whilst tripping…
2: The Big Lebowski (1998)
There are two major trip-sequences for The Dude (Jeff Bridges) in the Coen Brothers’ cult stoner noir, but the earlier ‘flying’ sequence is inspired by a nasty sock on the jaw from Maude Lebowski’s goons. The second rapturous sequence comes to pass when porn-king Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) slips the Dude a mickey finn in his White Russian. Darkness washes over our hero. Darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonlight prairie night – and soon he’s getting his bowling shoes from Saddam Hussein and participating in a Busby Berkeley-style ‘beaver picture’ with Viking Goddess Maude (Julianne Moore)…
1: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Lipton’s Tea indeed! This powerful drugged-dream sequence from Roman Polanski’s horror classic lasts the better part of six minutes, and is presaged earlier in the film by an ingenious dream interpretation of an overheard conversation between Mia Farrow’s devil-worshipping neighbours (played by Oscar winner Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). John Cassavetes is the unsuccessful actor selling his wife’s body to the devil in return for worldly success… Be warned that this clip is NSFW and powerful stuff in any case.
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