Amazon.com The road from respected MD to opium-addicted carny huckster is merely a puff away, according to Dwain Esper, the notorious exploitation auteur of the 1930s. Vival Sodar't is credited as director, but Esper takes top billing as "interpreter" of this salacious, hypocritical morality tale. Ostensibly based on the true story of snake-oil salesman William Davies, the uncle of Esper's wife Hildegarde, the film uses a veil of medical quotes and moralizing slogans to frame this sensationalistic story of drug addiction, depravity, and the road to spiritual ruin. The film lurches from scene to scene more like a demolition derby than a movie, but Esper knows how to keep an audience engaged: one highlight features a hopped-up taxi driver turning into a drooling maniac and steering smack into an oncoming train. It's scratchy old silent footage clumsily intercut with new close-ups, but the sheer outrageousness overcomes such details. Other scenes, however, suffer from wooden acting, clumsy transitions, and sheer directorial incompetence. Narcotic is a sensationalistic zero-budget mess, not a good film by anyone's standard, but the mix of hokey melodramatics, bargain-basement sets, eager scenes of depravity, and preachy moralizing creates an atmosphere of unintentional surrealism that is often impossible to follow but stupefyingly entertaining. --Sean Axmaker --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition.
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