ALICE IN ACIDLAND (1968)

If you ever wondered what your grandparents looked like having sex, this film shows you in excruciating detail.

This is the story of Alice Trenton, an innocent college freshman who attends the wrong sort of party, smokes pot for the first time, and has lesbian sex in a bathtub. She spirals out of control, takes acid, and winds up in a rubber room with a straitjacket on. The first 45 of this 55-minute exercise in annoyance and boredom is filmed in black and white and features non-stop sex scenes about as erotic as a Massengill ad. I never thought I’d wish for fewer tit shots!

But that’s not the only annoying thing about ALICE IN ACIDLAND. Among its other grating aspects:

- None of the characters speak. Instead, there’s a dual voiceover by Alice and a male narrator. However, given that she ends up blithering and insane, I don’t know how Alice is able to tell her story so cogently.

- The soundtrack consists of light jazz and clueless attempts at psychedelic pop.

- We’re told that the characters are hippies, but they really don’t look the part. The men are all clean-shaven, have short hair, and are dressed in slacks and button-down shirts. The women wear frumpy dresses and high heels.

- The “joints” that the characters smoke look suspiciously like regular cigarettes.

- For a film with interminable sex scenes, the cast is far from great-looking. In fact, some are downright flabby.

- The men keep their underpants on while shagging the women.

- Alice’s best friend, Janice, kills herself during a bad LSD trip, but the filmmakers saw no reason to show it. Rather, the narrator mentions her suicide after the fact—along with telling us that Janice got the acid from a “known lesbian.”

I don’t want to compare ALICE IN ACIDLAND to REEFER MADNESS because that would be unfair. REEFER MADNESS at least had entertainment value and did not render me incapable of ever loving or trusting again.