Still Smokin’ (1983)

Thus far, I have sat through four Cheech and Chong adventures, laughed a total of maybe three times and smiled a whole lot more.  In spite of this I do find these guys appealing.  They are dope-heads, they make a lot of trouble for the straights and they live a bottomed-out slacker lifestyle that I frankly don’t understand.  And yet, they are charming in a goofball way, generally inoffensive and, unlike the guys in Porky’s, not so volatile that I want to get away from them.

But, I really wanted to get away from Still Smokin’ a movie in which the boys seem to have given up.  You can’t say that their other movies were tightly plotted but at least there was some vague hint of a through-line.  This movie is just thrown together, following the boys to the marijuana capitol of the world, Amsterdam, for a film festival and what passes for a joke is that they boys end up in a limo intended for Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton and are mistaken for the real thing despite fans who are outside sporting signs with the pictures of the real Burt and Dolly on them.  That’s a joke?

Anyway, the last half hour of this movie is a series of seriously unfunny sketches involving a horrendously racist wrestling match and some bit involving an elderly married couple watching porn. They aren’t funny at all and it is easy to imagine that C&C were trying to do something different (their other adventures were basically the same thing over and over) but this movie feels listless, lazy and trashy.