Some say "Alice in Acidland" is a bad film, and while they're right--the pornography that comprises half to most of the picture is exceedingly dull and not particularly filmed well--in another sense, this is innovative filmmaking. It's as though someone found a silent stag film and decided to add two voiceover narrator tracts, one a cautionary tale from a supposed psychiatrist and the other from the Alice protagonist, along with minimal sound effects, to sell it as a self-contradictory narrative feature on the exploitation film circuit à la "Reefer Madness" (1936). A so-good-it's-bad tale that pretends to advocate and educate against the so-called evils of drugs and sex (including the lesbian variety, as depicted with copious amounts of nudity in this one), but, in fact, celebrates those very activities and can be quite laughable in the process. On top of all that, we get a final ten minutes of psychedelic art in color (as opposed to the rest of the picture's black and white) seemingly from a film student with access to an optical printer and the illicit substances the film warns us about. This is what cinema is all about: taking disparate materials and editing them together into something original and at least semi-coherent.
The "Alice in Wonderland" connection is a nice touch, too. The male narrator tells us this acid trip is no fairy tale, but here's a young woman named Alice going down the rabbit holes of drug and sex parties, led astray by the White Rabbit of her lesbian professor, meeting (and mating) a (sex) "animal," smoking as much as the hookah-fixated Caterpillar and otherwise ingesting as much as Lewis Carroll's Alice did magical mushrooms and other desserts, until the entire edifice crumbles like a deck of cards around her. No fairy tale for children, sure, but there's no pretending that drug and sex parties aren't the fantasies of every other mature viewer. Once again, the film tells us one thing, but shows us another.
The "Alice in Wonderland" connection is a nice touch, too. The male narrator tells us this acid trip is no fairy tale, but here's a young woman named Alice going down the rabbit holes of drug and sex parties, led astray by the White Rabbit of her lesbian professor, meeting (and mating) a (sex) "animal," smoking as much as the hookah-fixated Caterpillar and otherwise ingesting as much as Lewis Carroll's Alice did magical mushrooms and other desserts, until the entire edifice crumbles like a deck of cards around her. No fairy tale for children, sure, but there's no pretending that drug and sex parties aren't the fantasies of every other mature viewer. Once again, the film tells us one thing, but shows us another.