Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams (1981)

The 1981 stoner comedy Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams is the third of Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin's movies together, a meanderingly silly but agreeable farce about two clods selling marijuana treats from the back of an ice cream truck. Oblivious to an investigation by a couple of idiot cops whose boss (Stacy Keach) is constantly high from smoking evidence, the boys stumble through one crazy vignette after another. A few of these scenes feel like satiric spins on bad experiences Cheech and Chong might have had in the recording business, such as an evening spent with an obnoxious band manager who mistakes Tommy for Jerry Garcia and steals the Chinese food right off his restaurant table. Other craziness includes a night of sexual bliss interrupted by the arrival of a party girl's "Mexican-hating" biker-boyfriend, and incarceration in a padded room, where Timothy Leary supplies psychedelics to the clueless anti-heroes. Paul Reubens, Sandra Bernhard, and Linnea Quigley turn up in supporting roles. --Tom Keogh Amazon.com

Strange, surreal, hilarious, another great directorial effort by Thomas Chong...

I recently went through Cheech and Chong's catalog, specifically films directed by Chong himself. As I was watching Next Movie, this film, and Still Smokin', I noticed that all these films have a strange, surreal, laid back, leisurely style. Part of me wants to say that Tommy Chong was just stoned out of his mind when he directed these films (which he probably was), but I can't help but notice that the films (especially Next Movie and this one) have a flow unique to themselves. The pacing seems deliberate, there are many long takes in the film (including one when Cheech, Chong, and a dealer are at the dealer's house, and Cheech is burning tortillas while Chong is getting stoned), and the film seems to be deliberately made that way. It doesn't feel like a happy accident.

Nice Dreams is also a very funny film. It is also downright surreal at times with the dealer's "garden" and Stacy Keach slowly turning into a lizard while smoking the best grass anywhere. Cheech and Chong's "whales" song is pretty good, too. Even though pot use in movies is more common now, Cheech and Chong were the only ones doing it back in their day. Cheech and Chong just did it, they were never self conscious about getting stoned all day and making money off of it.

I am going to go out on a limb and say Chong has a directorial style all his own. I'd like to see him make another film. He hasn't directed one since Far Out Man, which was made sometime in the 1990's. Nice Dreams is a very good film. It's not as hilarious as Up in Smoke or Next Movie, but it's still very good. September 21, 2008

4 1/2 STARS FOR THIS CLASSIC AND LAST GREAT C&C FILM!

This is another impressive installment in the Cheech & Chong movies. This is the third movie in the series and like the others I saw them all at the theater when released. Great stoners comedies don't come around to often! This DVD could use an up grade like all the others. July 25, 2007

Where're their heads at?

This is the third Cheech and Chong film, coming after Up in Smoke (1978) and Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (1980). The films are a series in the traditional way--characters continue, and there is something of a linear development per the films' chronologies of the characters, but as with the plot of this film in isolation, the threads holding it all together are pretty thin.

In Nice Dreams, Cheech and Chong are selling dope from a barely disguised ice cream truck. They may have struck it rich by this point, or maybe Cheech just doesn't know how to read numbers very well. At any rate, they do not seem to be hurting for money--they have a bag of it, after all, which they have to pursue later in the film--and somehow, they're living in a very expensive, big house on the beach outside of Los Angeles, although it seems that maybe they're just crashing at a friend of a friend's place while he's away (he's a musician on tour).

A lot of it is pretty unclear, because the last thing that Cheech and Chong as writers and director (only Chong in the latter case) are concerned with is telling anything like a traditional story. Instead, it seems like maybe they were high while they wrote and filmed this. That's usually meant as a negative--the idea is to denote how little sense the work makes, or how little coherence it has. I don't mean it that way here. I don't mean it as a knock, necessarily. I mean it literally, and consequently to underscore a kind of stream-of-consciousness, absurdist and surreal flow. Those can all be very positive qualities, as they are occasionally here. But maybe Cheech and Chong were just looking for the easiest way to string together a number of sketch ideas, and not enough sketch ideas, because some of them are drawn out or reprised past their freshness date. And that probably goes for the whole premise of Cheech and the Man (Chong) selling dope and getting into wacky situations while being pursued by Sgt. Stedanko (Stacy Keach). Nice Dreams feels too much like Cheech and Chong are just coasting--vamping while waiting for the next soloist to start. Although I love experimentation as much as anyone else, this is a film that would have benefited from a stronger focus on telling a story in a traditional way. I don't always think that something different is better just because it's different.

So this is definitely a step down from the first two films, although there are more than enough funny moments to keep a fan of the first two films mildly entertained, and most of the supporting actors, including the returning ones, are enjoyable and had even more potential. Some skits (that word fits here better than "scenes"), like the crazy house and the fiasco at Donna's apartment, and even the "Save the Whales" song, are as good as most of the material in the first two films. But overall, it just seems like their hearts, and maybe their heads, weren't as much into making a film time around. August 11, 2006

2 funny guys in a very strange film!

This was a very weird film with lizard people and pot smoking cops. Bits are funny, but the weirdness definately permeates through most of the film, especially a sequence near the end where Cheech & Chong are being held in a padded cell. trippy stuff, which kept me interested, but not as funny as I had hoped. Up in Smoke still remains my favorite in the Cheech & Chong series. February 20, 2006

Good Times Watchin Nice Dreams!!

Great Flick to kick back and toke a big fatty to, gotta love this one! But wtf is up w/PeeWee Herman's "Hamburger Dude" character??? They must have been on acid when they thought that up...Speaking of acid, Dr. Timothy Leary makes a cameo which is totally awesome! yeah, rock on Cheech & Tommy! October 17, 2005

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