Stoner Flick - TV Tropes
- ️Mon Aug 20 2007
"We aren't very functional when we're stoned - which is all the fucking time."
Also known as THC Theater. A movie about The Stoner, made for the Stoner. Possibly made by Stoners, but that can't be proven, unless the creators acknowledge that it was.
Tend not to be especially plot-driven, and often contain long tangents relating to pop culture. Expect 90% of the humor to be either puerile jokes or humor about doing incredibly stupid stuff thanks to being intoxicated. Basically, Slice of Life genre for stoners. Many, but not all, Stoner Flicks are also examples of Drugs Are Good.
With these films, it's often recommended that you Watch It Stoned.
Examples:
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Films — Animation
- Fritz the Cat films:
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
- Yellow Submarine, a psychedelic example from 1968.
Films — Live-Action
- Arnold's Wrecking Company, a 1973 movie about a nerdy business major who gets turned on to the joys of grass and decides to go corporate with his dope-selling venture. Arnold's is a bit of an obscurity today (although the "Marijuana!" chorus from the film's soundtrack may sound familiar to fans of Dr. Demento, and writer/director/star Steven E. De Souza went on to write a few other movies you may have heard of, like, oh, Commando (1985) and Die Hard), but is noteworthy for being one of the first textbook examples of a "stoner" comedy, where weed is the main focus of the film rather than just a thing that turns up in it at some point (with some Unbuilt Trope mixed in, since the characters are portrayed as fairly competent and focused in running their business, and not much humor comes from comically boneheaded decisions characters make while loaded).
- The Beach Girls
- The Big Lebowski, a parody of old Detective Drama stories, where the gumshoe is actually a pot-smoking loser who finds himself in the movie plot.
- The Blueberry film adaptation. Writer/director Jan Kounen had tried ayahuasca while shooting an unrelated documentary about it, fell in love with it, and proceeded to heavily rewrite the film into a movie celebrating psychedelic drugs once he returned to France.
- The Book of Manson
- The Cheech & Chong series, the Trope Maker
- Dazed and Confused
- Dude, Where's My Car?
- Easy Rider: the Sixties version, back when pot was counterculture.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about the drug culture of the late 60s and early 70s. Director Gilliam mixes in a dash of modern stoner humor into the adaptation.
- Friday Film Series
- Ganjasaurus Rex (here
) mixes it with the Kaiju genre.
- Grandma's Boy: Nick Swardson says in one stand-up special that the actor who played Dante (the drug dealer) used real pot instead of the fake pot he was given for his scenes, which backfired on him when they ended up having to do a bunch of takes.
- Grass, though this one is documentary where everything else on this list tells a fictional story. Woody Harrelson provides the narration.
- Half Baked
- The Harold & Kumar series:
- The Harder They Come: Jamaican Cult Classic, released in 1972. Often treated as a stoner film, because, well, it was made in Jamaica.
- Help!: The Beatles were stoned off their asses during the making of it, and the non sequiturs and other ridiculous bits are far more entertaining.
- High School (2010)
- How High: Two stoners mix their friend's ashes with weed and find out that smoking it allows them to see his ghost.
- The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle
- Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson, an adaptation of the novel by Thomas Pynchon. A unique marriage of Stoner Flick and Film Noir in which a perpetually high detective gets involved in several intricate criminal conspiracies.
- Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back — the other Kevin Smith movies have drug influences, but are much less focused on it.
- J-Men Forever (1979). The villainous Lightning Bug schemes to conquer the Earth with Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, and only the J-Men (an elite team of tight-assed — we mean, straight-jawed men-in-tights) can stop him with a combination of re-dubbed Republic Film Serial heroes, schmaltzy music, and an indiscriminate bombing campaign of all suspected marijuana stashes. Has a vast number of Stoner jokes, including the motto of the J-Men which is "U Cannabis Smokem".
- Keep Off My Grass!, another proto-example from 1972 that co-stars Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees. Fits the traditional "stoner" comedy mold more closely than Arnold's Wrecking Company, in that more gags focus on the hippie protagonists' goofball antics, and their pot-selling enterprise doesn't work out nearly as well.
- Killer Bud
- Knocked Up, the b-plot is Stoner comedy all the way.
- Living Will, in addition to being a romantic comedy, has plenty of stoner humor.
- Mac And Devin Go To High School even opens with a cartoon spliff telling the audience to light one up before watching. In his review of the movie, Todd in the Shadows noted essentially that comedy movies which explicitly suggest the audience get high before watching usually aren't very funny to non-stoners — and everything is funnier when you're on pot anyway.
- Magical Mystery Tour, a trippy impromptu Beatles TV movie.
- Paul, a Science-Fiction comedy about two British comic book buffs on holiday in the U.S. who meet a pot-smoking alien voiced by Seth Rogen.
- Pineapple Express. Two stoners get mixed up in an action film. The title refers to a strain of weed.
- Reefer Madness (2005), the classic exploitation film remade as an over-the-top musical comedy.
- Saving Grace, possibly the most intelligent stoner movie ever made.
- A Scanner Darkly is a very dark deconstruction, as the hilarity the characters get up to is the result of their brains literally being destroyed by Substance D. They also live in poverty and squalor, one of them tries to commit suicide (and may have succeeded), and the protagonist himself grows increasingly out-of-touch with reality. And the film ends with a list of friends the author lost to substance abuse. Given the age of the source material, this may qualify as an Unbuilt Trope.
- Strange Brew is basically a beer variant — everything Bob and Doug do over the course of the movie relates back to beer somehow.
- Super Troopers, though ironically the first scene features the heroes tormenting and busting some potheads for possession.
- Smiley Face, stars Anna Faris as a stoner who had a few too many marijuana cupcakes.
- The Stoned Age
- Super High Me.
- Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny; the film is noticeably more pot-centric than the group's previous specials.
- Tenacious D themselves joke in the commentary that the film's message is that weed is friendship.
- The Wall.
- Withnail and I is a ruinously-heavy-drinking variant.
- Your Highness is a stoner flick with a fantasy adventure plotline.
- Zardoz. John Boorman himself was high when he made the thing and it shows.
Live-Action TV
Music
- Jam bands, particular groups like The Grateful Dead and Phish, are infamous for their stoner fanbases.
- Stoner Rap is its own unnoficial subgenre that has been going strong since the 1990's Up In Smoke tour. Luminaries of the genre include Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa and Cypress Hill.
- Stoner Metal is a subgenre of Doom Metal
Webcomics
- Jerk City is a Stoner Webcomic. As one of its catchphrases goes, powerful forces ("bonghits") are at work.