Narcotic is director Dwain (Maniac) Esper’s anti-drug propaganda flick that rallies against the use of opium. A doctor with a promising future is engaged to be married and spends his spare time volunteering at a free clinic. He starts hanging out with his Chinese friend from college who recreationally visits opium dens and before long, he becomes a hopelessly addicted doper. His wife figures out he’s an addict and tries to get him help. After a successful stint in rehab, he becomes addicted once again after getting into a terrible car wreck. Tragically, his life quickly spirals from there.
Lacking the jaw-dropping lunacy of Esper’s classic, Maniac or even the wild-eyed fun of the Esper-produced Reefer Madness, Narcotic is a tepid and routine affair. I guess that has a lot to do with the presentation as we’re told upfront it’s a “case study”. In another words, a factual account. What made Esper’s other adults-only roadshow outings so much fun is that they were fire and brimstone scare pictures. This one is more of a filmed manual about the dangers of addiction. Whereas Maniac had nudity and gore and Reefer Madness had hilarious overacting, this one has boring speeches about addiction. (To be fair, there may have been harsher scenes in its original release. The editing is so choppy throughout that it’s conceivable that at some point there was a tawdrier version before the censors got ahold of it.)
Other than a brief birth of a baby scene and the guy in yellow face who smokes hookahs and spouts fortune cookie witticisms, Narcotic is curiously low on the WTF moments you hope for from a dated scare picture. The closest it comes to matching the heights of Esper’s other works is the “dope party” scene near the end. Even then, it’s more or less just a bunch of people hanging around and telling bad jokes, but the close-up of a needle going in the arm is rather graphic. (The shots of the pothead’s uncontrolled giggling sort of portends the hilarity of Reefer Madness.) The funniest part is when one partygoer says, “We’re gonna get lit!” It’s nice to know that after nearly a hundred years some slang words never change.
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