American Beauty (1999)    

Kevin Spacey’s adoring obsession with Mena Suvari- in Sam Mendes’ tribute to the beauty we fail to notice – combines with his new-found love of cannabis to produce some of the most beautiful stoned imagery of the nineties….

The Matrix (1999)

Though the blue pill taken by Neo (Keanu Reeves) is merely symbolic, it’s a real drug with very real side-effects and consequences for him. What’s creepy about Neo’s ‘wake-up’ scene is the lag between taking the pill and the onset of the effects, which are as frighteningly invasive and irresistible as any more conventional ‘bad trip’…

Spiderman (2001)

Some radioactive venom sends Peter Parker on a trip through every beloved but cheap Sam Raimi trick in the book in the first of the hugely successful series….

Training Day (2001)

Ethan Hawke ends up landed with the new-boss-from-hell as the would-be narcotics cop learning some very bad lessons from ultra-hard, ultra-corrupt veteran Denzel Washington. Goaded to ‘man up’ by sampling the PCP that they are hunting down, Hawke goes green, as does the cinematography in this rather nauseous sequence. To add insult to injury, Washington then confesses that he has never tried anything that lethal himself…

Hannibal (2001)

An unrecognisable Gary Oldman plays trust-funded sex offender Mason Verger in Ridley Scott’s sequel to Silence Of The Lambs. In this scene he explains to Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) how Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) used a popper to persuade him to slice his own face off with a mirror so that our ‘hero’ could feed it to Verger’s dogs. “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”

Superman 3 (1983)

It would be a big mistake to look for much subtext in a movie this dumb, but the scene in the junkyard where ‘Evil Superman’ splits off from Clark Kent and fights him has always struck me as a trippy and symbolic representation of Supie’s inner conflict rather than a genuine stand-up fight. The drug that’s reduced our hero to this is Richard Pryor’s tar-laced synthetic Kryptonite…

Batman Begins (2005)

Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow uses a powerful weaponised hallucinogen to drive his victims into paroxyms of fear in Christopher Nolan’s warm-up for The Dark Knight…

Casino Royale (2006)

Bond gets slipped a nasty and quick-acting poison in Daniel Craig’s entry to the Bond canon and has to resort to some unreliable hi-tech MI6 jump-starting to keep his heart going. This is exactly the kind of innovation that managed to make Casino Royale such a stunning Bond film while keeping to the spirit of the character, traits largely missing from Quantum Of Solace…

Liquid Sky (1982)

Thrill-seeking aliens land on top of the apartment of a heroin-addicted New York drug dealer and themselves become murderously hooked on the human pheromones released during orgasm. Probably the weirdest set-up of any genre-exploitation film of the 1980s, and the producers didn’t spare us any ropey SFX on the trip sequences either…

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

A lot of the lexicon and iconography of drug culture developed directly from Lewis Carroll’s supposedly innocent fairy tale. A girl takes a mushroom and finds herself up against talking rabbits? Do us a favour. In this clip, more appropriate music has been inserted (not by us)…

Saving Grace (2000)

Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole helms Craig Ferguson’s tale of a woman (Brenda Blethyn) who naively turns to peddling cannabis in order to make a living. At one point she decides that she can’t sell something she has never tried, so it’s off to the seaside with Mr. Ferguson for a quick taster…

Spun (2002)

Speed-freak Jason Schwartzman hooks up with ‘cook’ Mickey Rourke and king-pin Eric Roberts for this dissolute but energetic tale of tweakers looking to fill up the hours of their empty lives. Some of the techniques used to depict being high are a tribute to the rather basic lens effects of the late 60s and early 70s…

The Acid House (1998)

Irvine Welsh continues to expound on the secret narcotic life of urban Scotland. The film is vaguely considered to be a descendent of Trainspotting but did not attract the same acclaim, perhaps partly because of the anthological nature of the three stories it tells. In the eponymous segment, Ewen Bremner gets stuck on the magic roundabout and some typical trip-out SFX…

From Hell (2001)

Psychic detective John Abeline uses his opium-induced dreams to find clues to the identity and whereabouts of Jack The Ripper in this atmospheric adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. In the first of the sequences John Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’) makes his first big-screen appearance since David Lynch’s 1980 biopic.

Bloodsuckers (1970)

Feckless Oxbridge luminary Patrick Mower ends up with a bunch of drug-taking, daylight-loving vampires on a Greek island. Unless you’re a big fan of Imogen Hassall (not unreasonable), the following trip/orgy sequence represents the only entertainment to be extracted from this interminable early 70s Euro-pudding. This sequence was one of many casualties of an almost random pruning of the film in order to obtain a broader certification in Europe, though it remains in many American versions…