Dope (1968) User Reviews

A feature documentary about a young girl's descent into drugs. Shot in 1960s London.

[flamejyoti · 10/10 · 26 April 2008]

Shot in the lilting, evocative style of filmmakers Sheldon and Diane Rochlin (now Flame Schon), DOPE-celebrated for its subversive content-was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. Praised as a film " ahead of its time" by Ricky Leacock, the Rochlins signed a distribution contract with Leacock-Pennebaker. But just as the final editing was completed, the distribution arm of Leacock-Pennebaker went bankrupt. The film has remained an underground indie classic ever since.

It really is a masterpiece, and people know that when they get the rare chance to see it.

The film works as a clear magnifying glass into the swinging London drug scene of the '60s with a great sound track mixed by Mark Dichter. Some beautiful as well as chilling shots of that in-between realm-the fragile edges of reality and dream, order and chaos, inertia and motion-reflecting transience, mortality and impermanence. Light and atmospheric, DOPE is a heady drama perfumed with scenes of heroin and hashish.

It's REAL!!!

[massimomule-727-690299 · 10/10 · 2 July 2013]

One of the best documentary I've ever seen. The matching music/images is perfect, at a time, seeing this work two times or more, you are going to be another friend among the characters are acting (better: living) in front of you. You can touch their skin and breath with them. Is like opening a window on their lives and jump in for 90 min. I bought the DVD to Flame Schon (new name for Diane Rochlin) and I talk to her with some mails and she explained me a lot about the film and the era. I spent my money well. Caroline (the main character) is a sort of guiding light for all the film who permits us to meet all the other people. I also appreciate the high quality of the images and the refinement of photography. The editing was high so every cut match perfectly with the others, and there are a lot of cuts.

Such a hard watch

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 7 March 2021]

Drug films come in two flavors. Those that make you want to try them to open your mind and explore the palace of wisdom or those that warn you that horrible things occur when you're an addict. This film would be in the latter camp.

A documentary by Sheldon and Debbie "Flame" Schon, this movie follows a junkie named Caroline as she moves through the drug scene of 1960s London, like being painted head to toe in the style of her mentor, psychedelic artist Vali Myers.

The Schon's lived with the characters in this film for months and there's a disturbing downward trend toward all of their lives. The only positive is that you get to see a sequence filmed at the original UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road where Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd are playing.

This film was lost for some time, but Flame Schon was selling copies of it through her website at one point. It's not a movie for those that hate seeing needles going in arms or worrying about addicts attempting to take care of children, who are caught in their drug haze.

You can see how drugs grabbed people in this era, but you're on the outside, unable to fully know its lure and how it destroyed lives because you are just someone watching from the normal world. That said, this is a strong movie that needs to be watched.

DOPE: The only movie to tell the true story of the late '60s London counter culture

[themoviedope · 10/10 · 23 May 2009]

Dope is the definitive document of counter-cultural life in London during 1967.

Vali Myers exists in the film as a shamanic presence - she appears as a being on another level - which she was. When she appears it's as if a quiet buzz occurs. So, her brief appearances serve to catalyze or underscore some change, some mood. She's a figure of freedom who punctuates the movie; her appearances are reminders of that consciousness, just as the appearances of needles puncturing arms are also punctuation of another sort. So, she can also be seen as a formal device in the construction of the film.

Dope's intention is to be dope - to overwhelm so that one uses another part of the mind/senses to process it all. However, it's not just the fast stuff but the slow stuff where it feels as if nothing at all is happening , in other words, an altered tempo in general was part of the drug experience intention of the film. And this presupposed the same frame of reference from the audience as well. There are scenes where not much at all appears to be happening, a blessed nothingness as it were....an "opening" into another realm..and this too is important. We- (Sheldon Rochlin and I-Diane Rochlin-now Flame Schon)- wanted Dope to say everything, far more of course than the catch as catch can material could accommodate. We wanted it to speak for a whole subculture generation - to express a unified point of view that we all shared. And in essence this was sort of a mystical magical unitary point of view. And, of course, we never said this to each other or to ourselves in so many words because it was simply one of our bedrock assumptions. So, yes, of course Dope is in a way very romanticized, but that's probably because it's not exactly a documentary; it's more or less an extended music video and also an anthem for a consciousness.

A pretentious, annoying, boring mess.

[kitano8 · 1/10 · 1 January 2020]

Poorly filmed, audio that is either unintelligible, out of sync or completely unrelated to the visual and not a thread of a story. To call this a documentary is false advertising at the least and intentionally misleading at worst. One hour, twenty nine minutes and twenty two seconds of random scenes cut together with no discernible relationship to each other. If you don't know what the plot of this "documentary" is (supposed to be) before watching it, you'll have even less of an idea after you've seen it. There are no spoilers in this review because there is nothing to spoil. While yes, it does have actual footage of real people taking real drugs during the late 60s, in places that look to be London, there's no way you can call this cobbled together mess a documentary.