'How High' vapid, not funny

By Christy Lemire
AP Entertainment Writer

"How High," a Universal Films release, was written by Dustin Abraham. It's rated R for pervasive drug use and language, and for sexual dialogue. Running time: 94 minutes.

After making commercials and music videos — for brother Jakob's band, The Wallflowers, and others — he's taken his dad's lyrics urging everyone to get stoned a little too seriously.

And the movie comes from Danny DeVito's production company, Jersey Films. (Maybe DeVito saw rappers Method Man and Redman smoking all those blunts and figured they were cigar aficionados like him.)

No amount of the most mind-altering drug could make this movie funny, though Method Man and Redman have said they were baked during shooting, so at least they were having a good time.

The rappers replant Cheech and Chong's old seeds as stoners Silas and Jamal, who invent an extraordinarily strong strain of marijuana that gets them into Harvard. The plant contains the ashes of a friend who died — he fell asleep while smoking a joint and lit his dreadlocks on fire — and appears to them as a ghost to give them the right answers to tests.

Clearly someone out there thinks this is a fun genre to revisit: "How High" hits theaters a month after "The Wash," starring rappers Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre as stoned car wash employees.

While that was an homage — if you can call it that — to the 1976 movie "Car Wash," this is trying to be a black version of "Animal House," with its rowdy students upsetting a placid academic setting.

There's an uptight dean, similar to Faber College's Dean Wormer, whose office the students sneak into in the middle of the night to vandalize. There's a wild bash, like the Delta House toga party, but it takes place in Silas and Jamal's dorm room and the guests include pimps and prostitutes.

There's a band that performs, but instead of Otis Day, it's Cypress Hill, whose songs include "Hits From the Bong." And all the shenanigans reach a madcap climax at the annual alumni dinner, sort of like the big parade at the end of "Animal House."

In between, Silas tries to date Lauren (Lark Voorhies), whose blue blood boyfriend Bart (Chris Elwood) is the condescending crew team captain. And Jamal hooks up with Jamie (Essence Atkins), the rebellious daughter of the vice president of the United States who eludes the Secret Service to sneak into bed with him.

For some inexplicable reason, Hector Elizondo shows up as the crew coach who adopts Silas and Jamal's baggy urban style, and Spalding Gray plays a guilt-ridden black studies professor ("Lynch me for what my people have done to your people!" he begs his students).

"How High" is just as misogynistic and racist as "Not Another Teen Movie," the year's worst movie. Silas keeps a naked woman in his bed, just so he can occasionally reach over and smack her backside. And while the white people are depicted as uptight elitists, the black characters, with a couple of exceptions, are over-the-top ghetto fools.

The only thing that barely redeems it from worst-movie-of-the-year status is its soundtrack of songs by OutKast, DMX, Cypress Hill, and — of course — Method Man and Redman.