GOLD / APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA: A Damn Dirty Hippie Double-Feature!

GOLD : 40th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Starring Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr
Directed by Bob Levis and Bill Desloge
Wild Eye Releasing

APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA
Starring Harry J. Anslinger, Fiorello Laguardia, John Holmes
Directed by Dennis Van Zak
Impulse Pictures

Review by Louis Fowler

Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during GOLD, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty 1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing hacky-sack.

OK, not really, but I did kick their sack down a sewer-hole just to spite them, and to spite this movie.

Like many lost-movie obsessives, when word hit that GOLD was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing a Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie free-love take on the well-documented lost American Dream of the 60s, complete with multi-colored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic-hair. At least that's what I was promised, dammit.

Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft dodgers—led by "comedian" Del Close—rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies while dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara. Improvised elections are also held on a train. The MC5 mostly blare on the soundtrack and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our Boys were dying face-down in the Vietnamese jungles, then sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!

With no rhyme, no reason and no proper editing techniques, it's as if the school from BILLY JACK made a movie and decided to actually write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, never funny and never enlightening, GOLD is just a total unwatchable mess, from start to finish. It's the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool-cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull.

And this Del Close guy...in every book written about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or the Groundlings will rave on and on about this dude as the "father of improvisational comedy", "the funniest man who you've never heard of", and so on. If GOLD is any inclination of his talents, there's a reason why you've never heard of him.

GOLD...you blew it, man.

On the other hand, APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA, manages to blow everything in sight.

Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? While I know some women who would easily fellate you for a dime-sack of high quality hydroponic sticky-icky with no hesitation, I have a feeling that has more to do with low self-esteem and the lack of a positive male role model growing up than it does any type of magically seductive ingredient laced within those tenderly pungent pot-buds.

Sadly, I personally have never been privy to such THSleazy doings--though it hasn’t been for a lack of trying--nor have I ever been to a swanky cocktail party wherein a joint is casually passed around and eventual inhalation of the demon weed leads to a spontaneously nude encounter group session wherein pock-faced, fully-bushed cuties are told to stare at your bathing-suit area and gently caress your mons pubis, as I am repeatedly promised in this 1971 sexploitation relic.

Sorry, APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA, but while you dubiously proclaim that cannabis is an ancient sexual enticer, a natural Spanish Fly of sorts that will lead even the most frigid broad to drop trou and let you plow, in my experience, it’s typically just two or three dudes chafing it up on a Goodwill couch, barely watching AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE and, almost ritualistically, going to sleep, alone, with a belly full of Salsa Verde Doritos, depressed that in their Maui Wowie haze that they can’t even maintain the most pathetic of erections for some tearful self-stimulation before passing out to side one of Jefferson Starship’s RED OCTOPUS.

Your visual dissertation just doesn’t hold (bong) water, APHRODISIAC! It does, however, hold other, thicker, fluids. While I’m sure in their heart-of-hearts the makers of this movie thought they were presenting a strong case for the use of marijuana as a sexual aide, all that hard work and scientific research is pretty much lost entirely the first moment unapologetic on-screen penetration occurs between two of the saddest, most unphotogenic low-rent porn actors the Bowery-based modeling agency could rustle up.

And, you know, I kinda liked that. The idea of a director trotting out to the nearest homeless shelter, paying a belligerent morphine-addict $10 to mime the most reptilian of sexual encounters with an equally uninterested, possibly dead hooker, using every diseased thrust as an opportunity to feel something other than the lifetime of mind-numbing regret and stomach-growling hunger...well that’s some sexy shit. It makes me feel like a shadowy Italian businessman who just paid $5000 to sit in a hotel room with other equally shadowy businessman--mostly Japanese--to watch a Bolivian snuff flick. I’m sure we can all relate.

APHRODISIAC! is a resin-crusted treasure of timeless misinformation and counter-culture propaganda, making the viewer not only never want to smoke reefer, but never procreate either. That’s a hell of a lot more effective than anything Nancy Reagan ever did, unless there’s a topless “Just Say No” PSA of hers floating around out there somewhere that I don’t know about. And I hope there is.