Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #223 The Stoned Age (1994)
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During my days as a video store clerk, the 1994 comedy The Stoned Age enjoyed a robust life as a popular second choice for people who really wanted to see Dazed and Confused but had to settle for its most prominent knock-off when the real thing was rented out.
The video store box for The Stoned Age even boasts “Better than Dazed and Confused.” Considering that Dazed & Confused is possibly the single greatest and most beloved stoner movie and teen comedy of all time that is high praise, no pun intended.
It’s not just high praise: it’s wildly, ridiculously, preposterously hyperbolic. That’s like an analyst praising some hungry prospect as “better than Michael Jordan.” You know damn well that however talented the young athlete in question might be, he’s almost assuredly not more talented than the greatest basketball player of all time but there’s nevertheless some weird part of your brain that takes the comparison at face value and want to know if it could possibly be true.
Not only is The Stoned Age most assuredly not better than Richard Linklater’s masterpiece of high school ennui: they’re not even on the same evolutionary plane. Dazed and Confused has mastered interplanetary travel while The Stoned Age hasn’t quite figured out the tricky yet all-important “wheel.”
When I was a kid and I’d see a blurb like “Better than Dazed and Confused” my dumb brain registered it as the universe’s irrefutable verdict, or at least the considered opinion of a respected critic or organization.
It wasn’t until I started reviewing movies myself that I realized that blurbs actually only represent the opinion of some dude somewhere. In this case that’s the opinion of someone who could not be more screamingly wrong, in their estimation of The Stoned Age and Dazed and Confused and, I would imagine, in every other conceivable way as well. They probably think IHOP is better than The Waffle House as well.
But if “better than Dazed and Confused” are the delusional words of someone violently divorced from reality I can see why they’d feel comfortable comparing the two movies. Dazed and Confused was famously and disastrously mis-marketed as a stupid stoner comedy for stupid stoners, which woefully misrepresented Richard Linklater’s love letter to the 1970s but also did not work commercially as the movie grossed less than ten million dollars.
If Dazed & Confused was poorly and dishonestly sold as silly pot-head nonsense, The Stoned Age really is a stupid stoner comedy for stupid stoners with nothing on its mind beyond babes, brews, stinkweed and sweet tunes.
On a superficial level Dazed and Confused and The Stoned Age have a lot in common. They’re both comedies set during the 1970s fueled by a soundtrack of K-Tel Super Hits that chronicle a lost night spent looking for sex, booze and weed.
Dazed and Confused used that trusty template to make a movie about everything: youth, nostalgia, the profound spiritual connection we feel towards pop music, democracy and humanity. The Stoned Age, in sharp contrast, is only about sketchy dudes trying to get fucked up so they can do some fucking.
Bradford Tatum, who was twenty-nine years old when The Stoned Age was made but looks considerably older, plays Michael Hubbs, the more toxic and insufferable of the film’s two stoner teen anti-heroes.
He’s like Wayne from Wayne’s World if the TV icon was a date rapist with a weakness for dropping F-bombs and also totally devoid of worthwhile qualities. The lowbrow cinema of the past is filled with land mines in the form of homophobic slurs and anti-trans hate speech tossed around gratuitously from characters reflecting the ugliness of the time and the prejudices of filmmakers and audiences alike.
The Stoned Age’s idea of a Tarantintoesque pop culture riff involves its central monster telling Joe Connelly (Michael Kopolow), his weaker-willed and less loathsome buddy that Blue Oyster Cult’s smash “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is the band’s requisite “pussy song” because, in his curdled imagination at least, every band needs to have a soft song for wusses in order to ascertain which members of the audience are what he lustily refers to, more than once, as a homophobic slur. These are the jokes, folks! And the mindset behind them.
The Stoned Age follows its anti-heroes as they try to leverage an exceedingly small amount of very bad marijuana and a considerably larger amount of alcohol in the form of a big-ass bottle of Schnapps into female companionship and then sex.
The dudes get a hot tip that there are some sexy ladies in a domicile somewhere by Frankie Avalon’s old home and are delighted if slightly intimidated to find Lainie (Renee Griffith), a sexy rock and roll chick who is down to party and strongly intimates that all it would take would be some 151 and some weed to get her out of her clothes and into an amorous mood.
The party babe’s friend Jill Wajakawakawitz (China Kantner) is nearly as attractive, albeit in a more bookish way that’s almost invariably coded as accessible “niceness.” For bonus points she’s even played by rock royalty: Kantner is the progeny of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner from Jefferson Airplane.
Jill is, in other words, the approachable girl with the winning personality the hero is supposed to end up with even if he initially lusts after her hotter, sexier friend but The Stoned Age really overdoes the adolescent nastiness and misogyny, in part by having sex-starved male losers constantly insult Jill’s looks in a way that doesn’t make sense.
In a similarly bewildering running gag, the dude-bros continually run into a trio of girls who are down to party and hook up but are supposed to be so ugly and awkward that even desperate horn dogs give them the continual cold shoulder.
Except that the girls aren’t ugly at all, or even particularly unattractive. They’re costumed and made-up to look plain and geeky but they’re nowhere near as undesirable as the movie inexplicably seems to think they are.
Kopolow’s aimless rocker at first seems to have a good chance at hooking up with Lainie but she angrily shuts down whenever things get hot and heavy. The more experienced Joe ends up having meaningless casual sex with the teenaged temptress while his sidekick gets to know Jill.
Then, in a development that unexpectedly takes the film into In the Company of Men territory, Michael tells his friend that he’s arranged for Lainie to give him a pity blow job by giving her a sob story about his tragic life but when he heads upstairs to receive oral sex she’s passed out and when he heads downstairs his asshole buddy is making out with Jill.
Being a real piece of shit, this does not keep the charmless teen played by an actor pushing thirty from continuing to insult Jill’s appearance, personality and existence.
Hey, it’s Clifton Collins Jr.! In a very shitty movie/role
Throughout the evening, Joe, who looks like the product of an unsuccessful attempt to clone Seth Green and was played by a twenty-five year old actor only five or six years too old to be playing a high school Junior sees a floating disembodied eye he first encountered at a Blue Oyster Cult show.
The cosmic goofiness proves a welcome respite from the rancid misogyny and homophobia, just as Kopolow’s bland affability renders him an infinitely more appealing protagonist than an asshole friend with a personality so toxic and unforgivable that it’s hard to understand why anyone would choose to spend time with him.
All The Stoned Age has going for it is a lot of lazy 1970s nostalgia and a soundtrack full of hits so massive that I spent the whole film wondering how a movie this cheap and half-ass could afford a soundtrack so seemingly expensive.
Watching The Stoned Age flail with the sturdiest premise in all of pop culture—teenagers trying to party and get laid—I was reminded not just of Dazed & Confused but also Booksmart, which I fucking adored.
Booksmart proves that it’s possible for a teen sex comedy to be woke as fuck and infinitely more fun than its rampantly problematic contemporaries. But you don’t need to compare The Stoned Age to all-timers like Dazed and Confused and Booksmart for it to come up short.
A mere twenty-seven years after encountering the film’s video box I’m glad I finally satiated my curiosity about The Stoned Age and discovered that it’s everything I thought it would be and even less.
Back then The Stoned Age struck me as nothing more than an irrelevant footnote to Dazed and Confused. It’s only managed to become less relevant with time.
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