Top 50 drug "trips' in movies



Den of Geek! compiled their top 50 favorite movie scenes "where the effects of drug-taking are depicted." When possible, they've also embedded YouTube clips of the scenes (hence the slow load of the pages). Their top five scenes are from:
1. Rosemary's Baby
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
4. Altered States (seen above, with a new trance soundtrack by Bedrock)
5. The Matrix
"Drugged! The top 50 trips in movies"

Discussion

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Including Casino Royale seems odd; as Bond ingested some kind of neurotoxin (hence his downing a shaker full of salt in the bathroom).

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How exactly does one do "a popper"?

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#4 posted by Anonymous, December 9, 2008 8:29 AM

Possibly NSFW, Boobies at 1:30

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@thelimopit: "Poppers" are an inhalant called Amyl nitrate. Popular within the Gay culture. Not that I've done them in the 80s or anything.

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Harvard Man, GO, The Rules of Attraction, SLC Punk

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@ZuZu - Very odd, especially considering that the original (or *real*) Casino Royal has a very trippy drug/brainwashing scene in it that wouuod fit much better into the list.

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I didn't know being bitten by a radioactive spider sent you on a trip. Does the DEA know about this?

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What? No Apacolypse Now?

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#10 posted by Anonymous, December 9, 2008 8:56 AM

How about Jacob's Ladder? ^_^

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It would appear that taking drugs is scary and not very fun. I tend to disagree.

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The only one that was realistic was the carpet in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

So I've heard.

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How did the crawling baby with the rotating head in 'Trainspotting' not make the cut? After watching that movie, I knew I would never touch heroin.

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I would have liked to see the scene from "Ours, L'" (The Bear) where the bear cub eats the shrooms make the list.

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One word:

ZAPPED!

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The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Celluloid revelation.

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A couple not on the list...
Tommy (an awful movie with a great drug sequence featuring Tina Turner as the Acid Queen)

Natural Born Killers. No explanation needed.

The Simpsons (there are several episodes, but the one with Homer eating the chili pepper is probably the best example)

And I have to second the one who mentioned Apocalypse Now. I don't know if I'd agree with the order that the author chooses, but he seems to have most of the ones I'd list. Looking at that list reminds me of exactly how many drug scenes there are.

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#19 posted by jrc, December 9, 2008 9:44 AM

So sad not to see Hard Core Logo on there. I mean, it even gets meta with the film crew gets involved in their acid trip and well, there's a goat and a chainsaw...

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Blueberry, aka Renegade -- possibly the only psychedelic Western. The trip sequences are gorgeous.

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#21 posted by Anonymous, December 9, 2008 10:03 AM

ditto on 'Blueberry', aka Renegade
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276830/

If you have not seen.... it is a must, seriously...

Also did I miss something or was 'The Serpent and the Rainbow' not on the list?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096071/

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My bad. Head-turning baby is there @ #14. I think it deserves to be in the top 10 though.

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Den of Geek! also has a “Top ten mindfuck movies”, where I just found these beautiful lines:

The Matrix (1999)
There is no sequel.
There is no second sequel.

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i hated the movie, but i thought the recent Across the Universe had a good trip scene

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No Jacob's Ladder or Dead Babies? This list is just awful.

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dumbo. pink elephants on parade.

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having dabbled in mushrooms over the years, the kind of trip depicted in the Altered States clip (particularly the first 4 minutes) was pretty bang on for what a 'bad trip' is like. i remember eating the shrooms as i watched Oprah and she had all these horrifying medical stories, like a woman with a 40lb tumor - not exactly what you want to feed your subconscious while ingesting a bunch of blue-grey caps.

that was the last time i did mushrooms and it was the worst time of my life; besides screaming at random people on the street, falling into colors, experiencing a nuclear bomb exploding inside my torso, and being a guillotine i also nearly burned my friends house to the ground.

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That Altered States clip is great - might want to have a little NSFW (nsfw maybe?) thereon.

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Another good one was Tenacious D' and the Pick of Destiny and Bringing out the Dead.

Oh and to #11: I agree, but deny everything.

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WHAT?

No tripping-in-the-graveyard scene from Easy Rider? Probably the best film version of an LSD trip ever.

(with the added bonus at a later point in the movie of a stoned Jack Nicholson talking about aliens:

"That was a UFO beaming back at ya. Me and Eric Eisen was down in Mexico two weeks ago. We seen 40 of 'em flying in formation. They've got places all over the world now, you know. They been coming here ever since 1946, when the scientists started bouncing radar beams off of the moon. And they have been living and working among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about em. ...They are people just like us, from within our own solar system, except but their society is more highly evolved. They don't have no wars. They got no monetary system. They don't have any leaders. Because, I mean, each man is a leader. Because of their technology they are able to feed, clothe, and transport themselves equally and with no effort. ...Why haven't they contacted us? Because of the tremendous shock it would be to our antiquated system. The result of this has been that the Venusians have contacted people from all walks of life. All walks of life. It would be a devastating blow to our antiquated system. So now, Venusians are mating with people from all walks of life, in an advisory capacity. And for once, man will have a God-like control over his own destiny. He will have a chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for all.")

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I would have thought that the Absinthe scene with the Green Fairy from Moulin Rouge should have made the list, and Blueberry should have been on the top of the list.

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#32 posted by Anonymous, December 9, 2008 2:36 PM

Dumbo?
Pinocchio?

Both terrifying...

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No "Naked Lunch," huh? That's quite an oversight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh-Q07iVQws

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OH. . . for a second I thought they meant "50 greatest drug trips experienced by movie-goers" and then (naturally) thought "how did they know about that? Was my paranoia correct all along? I KNEW IT-- they had cameras in there watching us during Koyaanisqatsi."

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they had cameras in there watching us during Koyaanisqatsi

For me it would have been ten hits of acid and a bottle of poppers at Rocky Horror. SciFi drag musicals are so much better when you think that it's actually happening in real life. On the other hand, acid + Eraserhead equals fail.

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@#1: I concur. The hallucination scene during Beavis and Butthead Do America was inspired by the artwork of Rob Zombie. It's one of the best parts of the whole movie.

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What about when Lisa drinks the "water" in Duff Garden's Little Land of Duff? A superb depiction of a trip: "Aahhh, I can see the music", etc.

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Scanner Darkly? Waking Life? Where's the Linklater love?

I hear Cheech and Chong movies have a few references if you look close enough.

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My sister dropped acid for the first time and went to a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead. When she got home, her eyeballs were about popping out of their sockets.

Kiddo, what were you thinking?

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Fail. Only one Cheech and Chong movie? And the one they chose is the one where they didn't actually DO any drugs in the entire movie. The obvious choice is the trip scene from "Nice Dreams" which takes place in a mental institution and features Timothy Leary, Pee-Wee Herman, and the noisemaker guy from Police Academy. I mean come ON! That's got to be the best trip scene of all time!

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Can't believe they missed 'Blueberry', the whole trip scene is so... insinuous. Never done anything like Peyote but it still got under my skin. CGI centipedes et al.

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Other Worlds: A Journey Into The Heart of Shipibo Shamanism.Same director as Blueberry,Jan Kounen.

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good list - but i personally think Train Spotting could be higher...there should be a whole list of Simpsons tripping sequences as well...

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@32 I am also surprised to have not seen Dumbo in here, it is an absolute brilliant trippy animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nwNPaYoTY8

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#35 ANTINOUS

For me it would have been ten hits of acid and a bottle of poppers at Rocky Horror

Dude, with ten hits of acid you don't NEED a movie.

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Oh there is a BIG miss in that article.

Skidoo

In which Jackie Gleason trips out on LSD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jwd32yTxFY

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#33

I agree, I was pretty surprised naked Lunch wasn't on here. Easily the weirdest "drug trip" movie in existence.

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I agree with rAMPANTiDIOCY @ #24...i thought the acid trip scene from Across the Universe would be somewhere near the top (as in best) of the list. Watching it in the theater was an amazing experience...

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#50 posted by Anonymous, September 23, 2009 8:20 AM

dude a great trip is the elephants on dumbo, and alice of wonderland of corse. The originals poppin E and watching speed racer lol thats great but its fun getting high and watching tim burtons charlie and the chocolate factory. But thats all my opinion i love the fact you all know so many great trips lol opened up my world a bit more hahaha. O yah watch the movie shrooms when your halusinating(*spelled that hella wrong) but its trippy seeing that shit happen to them and then you start having there trip

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