"Cheech & Chong's Next Movie"

The received wisdom = 'Up in Smoke' is an essentially good-natured screwball farce, with the pot-smoking purely a 70s spin on the long tradition of dim-bulb double-acts, while the subsequent films became sloppier and more puerile, and thus of no further interest to serious students of film comedy. IMHO, however, 'UIS' was 'A Bout de Souffle' to 'Next Movie''s 'Weekend'. 'Next Movie' is anarchic in form (an incoherent picaresque that doesn't conceal the stand-up skit origins of all the tenuously-linked incidents), but what makes it interesting is that the comedy has been replaced by pure nihilistic class-warfare viciousness. Every scene is played in documentary-like squalor - characters urinate out windows while toilets are used to chill beer, cockroaches pulverized and smoked, a long scene takes place in a welfare office where obvious junkies and alcoholics are the comedic focus, the stoners blithely drive while intoxicated and destroy people's front lawns in impoverished areas, Chong brags about fooling his PO with urine stolen from his pregnant (and, by implication, also drug-using) sister, C&C get seats at the crowded welfare office by tricking an old man with a cane into standing up and vacating his chair. Not only are all the 'characters' completely unsympathetic, but there is no moral redemption, no consequences, just pathetic victory (a suitcase full of Thai stick) for whoever is the most inconsiderate and destructive. (I believe this was to frustrate the conventions of 'naughty' comedy - a deliberate attempt at having 'no redeeming social value', which succeeded in its aim of repelling all the critics who thought they were 'with-it' and 'liberal' defending UIS.)
The first Pee Wee Herman sequence struck me particularly - C&C step over a wino to reclaim their luggage, but first they must deal with desk clerk Pee Wee. Instead, they break into 'their' room to steal it, pausing to humiliate a couple mid-coitus (Chong waves a used novelty condom in the man's face like a yo-yo), then snicker "Wrong room, man!" (Place that phrase in the film's barrio milieu - imagine those words being uttered by the LAPD after a particularly violent raid? There is DEFINITE class hostility going on here. Sexual humiliation is also an ongoing theme, as another cartoon WASP is exposed doing a 'chicken dance' in a massage parlour, and his embarrasment is subsequently a running gag.) Pee Wee, meanwhile, has called the police, who utterly ignore him until he yells "Help! Iranians!" - of course, helicopters and SWAT teams descend immediately - but is stitched up by C&C, and the scene that follows - the spindly Pee Wee being beat up by cops - is disturbing due to his screaming in a child's voice for what seems like eons - a police-brutality scene even Oliver Stone would shy away from. Also, in UIS, the drug references were of that 'faux-naif' variety - kids getting stoned for the first time, "Wow man, I feel like...pizza!" By 'Next Movie', there is no more sugar-coating - the drug-use is relentless, obsessive, and the focus has changed from the kind bud to cocaine, the symbol of rapacious greed that was filtering down from the showbiz C&C really inhabited to the barrio they were depicting. I think 'Next Movie' was designed as the 'barrio's revenge' - a difficult, sometimes unwatchable Los Angeles Olvidados, with the humour distilled down to sheer, nihilistic nastiness, when it's there at all. Anybody else notice this?