I have never thought that someday a Mauritian hip-hop rapper would take over Universal 1440 Entertainment as the brand is pretty known for its decades-late sequels to cult classics about stoners. More than seventeen years after the original, NBCUniversal’s subsidiary that produces DTV movies known as “The Direct Video Beat” Give Us Etiquette 2, in March 2019 and plans on releasing Half Baked this year, making it twenty-six years since the debut of the first movie. A sister company of Universal, which has produced straight-to-video sequels of popular movies such as American Pie, introduces Castrol Nine. Down also produces sequels for obsoleted movies including Alexander, and The Texans. Their C-grade horror flicks have been unremarkably bland, and the typical idea for The Historical Oregon is laughing at War of the Worlds and starring Killam. I tell you that more and more studios should implement this policy.
We do not even have to explain how big of a cult feel Half Baked (1998) and How High (2001) movies were back in the day, or if anything, they go hand in hand with a greasy PlayStation and empty bags of Combos just before going to score some weed. They didn’t make a splash in the theaters but secured their identity through VHS tapes and DVDs where music, nerd culture, and smoking music were the most prominent themes such as shooting over Manhattan with the power of weed or smoking your dead friend’s ashes in order to see him so he helps you get through college. A list of strange incidents couldn’t go without mentioning the fact that Dave Chappelle was intense as always in his role as a voice of the stoner security guard Thurgood in Half Baked, and in How High Method Man and Redman were physically amusing as they continuously seemed to have fun while pulling at all of the bottom strings of Harvard. [Btw, How High is also Jesse Dylan’s feature film debut, while Spalding Gray’s last acting credit was that of an exaggeratedly sycophantic black history professor.
Half Baked Totally High is a direct sequel to its predecessor where Thurgood’s son JR (Dexter Darden) struggles with life since his mother Mary Jane (glad to see Rachel True here) took him there after abandoning his lousy father. Also, there is a super quick cameo by Harland Williams one of the original four with Chappelle, Jim Breuer, and Guillermo Diaz here, he’s a gym teacher with too much love for smoke. How High 2 is a lot more non-dependent on its predecessor, creating completely new characters existing in this world that the first movie inhabits. The wastrel’s Roger and Calvin, played by rapper Lil Yachty and the multi-hyphenate DC Young Fly, who live in Rogers’ mom’s basement and discover a weed bible that seems to grow the best strains have turned it into an extraordinary one. How High 2 has also got Mike Epps to make a cameo as the ever-laughable peddler, Baby Powder. Alvin together with kids Nic and R KO takes care of all in-house problems with powder slaps. Also making a return are Al Shearer playing the quiet “I Got Money” the transformation of his broke DJ “I Need Money” in the original and T.J. Thyne all these years down the line and still a defined narc’s made it.
Such narrative structures are borrowed and revived in the second film which also hilariously attempts to encapsulate its humor in a series of mash-up parodies haphazardly cribbed from Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke. The plot of the film involves JR and two of his friends who have absolutely no sense or worth Myles, a cab driver and failed standup, and Corey who hawks sex toys formed after her social media. They seek to go from California to Passaic, NJ to inter Bruce who dies after smoking a blend of weeds i.e. Sativa, Indica, and a newly found Biblica weed. Wanting to fleece money to fund this trip, JR and his buddies start selling the newly discovered weed. Roger and Calvin’s weed bible and stash are stolen by some horrible people and the cruel world makes them wander for what seems forever in How High 2. They roam their old institution of torment the high school, a Russian mafia house with scantily clad ladies, and a suspicious pharmacy company run by Mary Lynn Rajskub posing as Elizabeth Holmes.
Stoner films glorify rambling effortlessly, as plots expand and shift into nonsensical side stories that never quite add any value to the main action, almost as if the characters are telling their tales badly. The script for Half Baked contained the strange element known as the Guy On the Couch, where Steven Wright at all times appears lethargic and, like a wandering phantom, haunts various areas of the background. A scene from How High, that really gets troubling, features Dean Cain, a character best left in the last century, collaring Method Man and Redman and threatening them with expulsion. Having apparently run out of other options, the protagonists intend to resurrect John Quincy Adams and use the power of his ghost to help them pass their final exams. Did it occur to anyone that they are trying to be ‘quite’ humorous by claiming that smoking a dead person’s ashes would somehow work? It is much wider than this audiences witness 50% of violence and only 6% of originality per serving. This is an amazing moment they are witnessing, disorderly conduct with the time-honored flair of a classic animator.
How High 2 channels that spirit when Calvin attempts to use Rajskub’s safe model of weed substitute called ‘Fye’ which has made a lot of test subjects go mad during the cover-up of its secret trials only to be met with smoke shooting out of his nipples. DC Young Fly’s electric performance as well as his eccentric body movements make these elements of heightened slapstick comedy feel routine. In Half Baked Totally High, the villainous white corporate is an angry David Koechner who operates a legal marijuana shop and pursues an aggressive strategy to eliminate all the self-reliant business operators. At least as distributed by Universal 1444, the weed film has become negative of the development of the corporatism that followed legalization and views the independent marijuana seller in the way of early civilization settlers before the Western civilization consumes it.
Koechner is not the moustache-twirling final bad guy in Half Baked Totally High for he has not reached the highest echelons in the corporate-criminal ladder. Shadow, the drug kingpin with bad breath (Justin Miles) who Axios suffers from halitosis appears to be behind the biblica sample, but JR learns he is a softy. is the one that actually delivers the final thrilling excitement. No, that is the last straw they do not know, but which J.R. Moore’s character did show even without limbing him, one of the regular-handed staff members at the bar, and this time quite dazed and played by Frankie Muniz, drags out the tortures run of the strain with the complex nutraceuticals produced from it biblica, turning the half-baked part of the film into a horrific parody of tense discrimination tantrums.
Naturally, 30 years too late additional films that are made on a shoestring budget should be full of surprises. The surprise in How High 2 is DC Young Fly’s portrayal of a man who strikes every corner of the room like Daffy Duck fresh off a binge, while in Half Baked Totally High it is how the final act becomes more and more nonsensical and eventually flies out of the universe itself. Whatever Universal 1440 is engaged with I want to be a part of it too.
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