Up in Smoke (1978)
★★½ — Up in Smoke (1978)
There are stoner comedies, and then there is Up in Smoke, the film that more or less invented the genre as a commercially viable proposition. Released in 1978 by Paramount Pictures, it arrived at a particular cultural moment: the tail end of the counterculture era, when marijuana had drifted from the political fringes into something closer to mainstream youth culture, and when audiences were ready to see that world reflected back at them without a moral lesson attached. The film follows Anthony Stoner, a directionless young man who escapes his overbearing parents and falls in with Pedro de Pacas, a cheerfully chaotic fellow traveller. What passes for a plot involves the pair blundering through a series of misadventures, getting arrested, getting released, and somehow ending up competing in a rock band contest. The plot, such as it is, is largely beside the point.
The film marked the feature debut of Lou Adler in the director's chair, though Adler was already well established as a music producer and record label founder before he turned to cinema. It was drawn from the stage act and comedy album work that Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong had built over the preceding years, and that source material shows in every scene: this is sketch comedy stretched to feature length, with the looseness that implies. The supporting cast includes Strother Martin, a character actor with a long and varied career, and Edie Adams, both of whom add a degree of polish to a production that was, by design, fairly rough around the edges. The film performed well enough at the box office to spawn a franchise and cement Cheech and Chong as genuine cultural figures, their names essentially synonymous with a certain flavour of 1970s American comedy. If you want a sense of what else was being made in that decade across very different registers, it is worth glancing at something like Futureworld, another film from the period that captures the era's particular anxieties, or the rather different world of A River Called Titas, a 1970s film that could hardly be further in spirit from Cheech and Chong's antics.
Cheech Marin would go on to work across a wide range of projects in the decades that followed, including a memorable turn in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which gives some sense of how far his career travelled from these early stoner comedies. For now, though, it is 1978, the van made of marijuana is pulling up, and the question of whether any of this is funny probably depends more on your current state of mind than on anything the film itself does or does not do.
I haven't smoke in about 12 years. I definitely rated it higher back then. Up in Smoke isn’t so much a movie as it is a 90-minute excuse to smoke a joint and laugh at the same joke over and over. Cheech and Chong basically built a cult classic out of bad impressions, sketch comedy pacing, and an endless supply of weed gags. If you’re deep in that stoner culture, this is sacred text. It's funny, rebellious, and totally in on the joke. The van made of marijuana is the icon. It’s dumb in the way it’s supposed to be, and there’s a certain charm in how little it cares about plot or logic. But if you’re not high (or haven’t been for a while) it kind of just… sits there. The jokes are one-note, the acting’s loose to the point of laziness, and the whole thing feels more like a series of riffs than an actual film. What feels hilarious at 2am with red eyes can feel flat and repetitive the next day sober. It’s not bad, per se (it’s harmless, silly, and has its moments) but it doesn’t exactly hold up as cinema. It’s a product of its time and scene: if you’re in that scene, you’ll love it. If not, it’s just… fine. More of a vibe than a movie, but hey, sometimes that’s enough.
For me, that last point is really the crux of it. There is a version of myself, some years back, who would have ranked this considerably higher, and I think that version had a point, even if the reasons were not exactly critical ones. What Up in Smoke does, it does with a kind of commitment: it is not trying to be anything other than what it is, and there is something almost admirable in that refusal to reach. It sits alongside other comedies I have covered, like Trolls, in the sense that the whole thing is really engineered around a specific audience's good time rather than any broader ambition. Whether that makes it worthwhile depends entirely on which side of the joke you happen to be standing on. Sometimes a vibe really is enough. Just, perhaps, more so at 2am than at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1978 | Watched: 2025-09-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Up in Smoke (1978) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: JustWatch TV · Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: JustWatch TV · Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More with Cheech Marin: Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
