Boring

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Just about everyone's heard of the film "Reefer Madness", but back in the Thirties there was a whole slew of these 'educational' drug flicks - "The Marijuana Menace", "She Shoulda' Said No", "Cocaine Fiends", and this one - "Marihuana". They're all pretty much on a par and picking a 'best' one pretty much becomes a function of which one you just watched. It's been a while now since I saw the others I've just mentioned, but as always, you have to wonder what audiences of the era must have thought about this kind of stuff. It all translates rather hokey and over the top today, especially in the connections made between smoking marijuana and immediately falling into a life of depravity and decadence. Sometimes you know, it takes a little longer.The hook for this flick without question is the unrestricted nudity by the giggle girls who take it all off and go for a midnight swim at the beach. Given the year it was made, you might think that there would only be mere flashes of selected body parts to titillate the viewer, but breasts and behinds are right out there in all their glory. One girl even does a complete twirl at a distance from the camera, so you might say there's even some frontal nudity on display, but that's probably a stretch. Still, there's not a lot left to the imagination.As in all these stories, things happen at a pretty rapid pace once things start to go south for the main character. In this case, teenager Burma Roberts (Harley Wood) smokes a joint, gets pregnant, suffers her best friend's death by drowning, gets married, gives up her baby for adoption, starts dealing dope and eventually gets hooked on heroin herself. If that's not enough, she concocts a scheme with her pushers to kidnap her sister's adopted daughter. One guess who that adopted daughter really is.Well the opening narrative states that this story was drawn from an 'actual case history', and if it was, fine, but I get the impression that all of these exploitation flicks were made on the fly without too much thought to get in the way. Like this one, they're all a hoot and a half, and even though they might have been intended to make you get serious about the subject matter, it's hard to imagine today that they had any effect at all on the intended audience. If you've never seen one you really owe it to yourself to check out what the fuss was all about back in the day.

Not badly made for a low budget film of 1936. This is not propaganda, as others have termed it, but it actually has a plot and even a bit of a twist. Somewhat "shocking" for a film of this era, it has sex, nudity, unwanted pregnancy, and alcohol/drug abuse. Interestingly, this film is not about substance abuse in the ghetto but in more affluent households.The plot follows a purported teenager (although she is the oldest looking teenager I have ever seen in film) as she progresses from drinking to marijuana use, to heroin use. The symptoms of narcotic use are either exaggerated or ignored (with marijuana use people giggle non-stop while with heroin use there is no depressant effect) but the process of progressing from alcohol and marijuana to serious drug use and even drug dealing is accurate to this day.Contrary to the title, don't expect it to be about marijuana, but about drug use in general and you will enjoy it.

Based on a true newspaper account, this movie is a riveting near- documentary which tells the truth about the drug menace that is destroying our country today. I advise all concerned citizens to watch it twice and show it to their friends and teen-age children.A delightful film, the nude midnight bathing scene is worth the price of admission You really have to feel sorry for the lead character, Burma. Her friend dies drowning, her boyfriend gets shot, she gives up the baby she wants to keep (I'm not sure why), and when she kidnaps her sister's kid for ransom, it turns out to be her own child. Her life makes Britney Spears seem like Donna Reed.It really appears that the filmmakers experimented with marihuana to get the experience down correctly. I would not be surprised if they were continuing their experiments throughout the film-making process.

**SPOILERS** One of the many exploitation movies made in the 1930's about weed pot or marijuana the film "Marihuana" is mostly about a sibling rivalry between two young sisters Berma and Eline who come from one of the towns most upright and blue blood families. Eline is engaged and to be married to local rich well connected and also blue blood Morgan Stuart while Berma is in love with a local boy who's both poor and out of work Dick Collier. With Eline being her moms favorite Berma rebells by partying and going out with the wild crowd who drink and do pot and have naked sex parties at night. One Saturday evening after having a wienie roast on the beach the roast turns deadly when one of the girls Joann, Berma's best friend, who was drunk and butt naked runs into the ocean and drowns. Meanwhile back at the beach house the rest of the girls at the party undress and run naked out on the beach skinny dipping into the cold waters with their boyfriends, fully dressed, chasing them. Alone and by themselves both Dick and Berma has a sexual tryst which later results in Berma getting pregnant.With the news of Joann's tragic death the local pot dealer Tony Sentello tells the young people at the party, who looked like they were in their early twenties at the least, to keep their mouths shut if they don't want to be taken away from their parents and put into a local orphanage. Dick wanting to get married to Berma and give their expecting child a proper name as well as a family gets a job working for Tony as a drug runner. On Dick's first day on the job he's shot and killed by the police as he picked up some pot from Tony's sidekick Nickie Romero, who's a dead ringer for actor Andy Garcia,on the waterfront. The very day that Dick was shot and killed Eline and Morgan were happily married at the town church.Giving her baby up for adoption Berma went to work with Tony and Nickie in their pot selling racket and later even went into selling the hard stuff, heroin, which she herself soon got addicted to. Leaving an apartment house after selling some heroin to a desperate woman, who gave up her engagement ring for the dope, Berma sees her Sister Elaine with her husband Morgan and their little girl Gloria. Berma gets this idea to kidnap Gloria and hold her for a ransom of $50,000.00 from her rich parents knowing that both Eline and Morgan wouldn't want this to become public with the person responsible for the kidnapping being a close family member. Going to get in touch with Morgan to get the ransom money Berma get the startling news from her brother-in-law that Gloria is not his and Eline's real child but she was adopted from an underground baby selling mill and she's really Berma's child that she gave up for adoption some three years ago.In a state of shock and emotionally destroyed Berma realizes that the one thing that she had over her hated sister Eline, a child of her own, she unwittingly gave away to her.Going back to the apartment hideout where her partners in crime, Tony & Nickie, were holding her daughter Gloria hostage Berma gives herself a "hot Load" injection in her leg. As she enters the apartment Berma finds that the police raided it, and arrested both Tony and Nikie, and rescued Gloria. With the drugs taking affect Brma slowly goes into shock and collapses and overdoses from "the hit" that she just gave herself.