Oddball Films presents Boozers, Users, and Losers - Vintage Drug and Alcohol Scare Films, a program of mind-expanding, terror-intending and hilarity-inducing short 16mm educational films about the dangers of drugs. These classroom classics from the 1950s through the 1980s were meant to scare the pants off the junior-high set but probably encouraged as many to experiment with drugs and alcohol as it discouraged. Watch mice get drunk and drunks flip cars in the teen drunk-driving scare film None for the Road (1957). Real teens talk about their dalliances with substance abuse in the classroom primer aimed at preteens, Drugs: First Decision (1978). Melanie and Kathleen are desperate to experiment with drugs in excerpts from Degrassi Jr. High - The Experiment (1987). As seen on TV, filthy hippies druggies get what's coming to them in Dragnet: Little Pusher (1969). It may be in Spanish, but you won't miss the message behind the bizarro cartoon Sex, Booze, Blues and Those Pills You Use (1982). And because it never gets old, the Oddball favorite The Cat Who Drank... And Used Too Much (1987) will be drunk driving by. Plus! Vintage Drug and Alcohol PSAs, Beer Commercials, LSD freakouts, the angel dust documentary PCP: You Never Know (1979) for the early birds and more tripped out cinema - all on 16mm film from our massive stock footage archive!
"Jerry Landon is one of the types that experiments with drinking... The all-out type"
A good old-fashioned drunk driving scare film replete with a white-coater injecting lab rats with alcohol and making them do acrobatics! The story centers around 3 couples at a sock-hop; the girls are all drinking ginger ale, Keith has had a couple of beers and Jerry has been "holding down the fort" all night and gotten himself blotto. When he gets in a fight with his gal Eydie, Jerry storms off for his car. Can Keith catch up to him and make sure he makes it home alive, or will Keith's couple of beers mean the end for him and his passengers? See who makes it out alive!
Degrassi Jr. High - The Experiment (Color, 1987)
The Degrassi empire began in 1983 and continues to this day (with a few breaks and
reimaginations along the way). With age-appropriate casting and a bent towards taboo subject matter (abortion, AIDS, vibrators, penis pumps, incontinence on top of a cheerleading pyramid) Degrassi has been pushing the envelope for 30 years. In this episode from the first season of Degrassi Jr. High, Melanie and Kathleen are so anxious to try drugs, they buy aspirin off of Joey and have the trip of a lifetime!
Dragnet: Little Pusher (Color, 1969)
Sex, Booze, Blues and Those Pills You Use (Color, 1982)
A particularly unusual, and gut-splitting, animation about alcohol and sexual disfunction reminds the audience that one or two drinks might turn you into casanova, but too much many might leave your lover something to be desired.
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 250 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
About Oddball Films
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.