Welcome back to Heady Entertainment, MERRY JANE’s weekly guide to just-released movies, books, and music — all fresh, dank, and THC-friendly. In specific, we choose our picks based on how they can enhance your combined consumption of cannabis and entertainment.
Movie theaters are dominated this week by Pennywise the diabolical clown in It: Chapter 2 (and rightly so), but you can also puff to the entertaining paranoia of Satanic Panic and Morgan Spurlock’s potentially munchie-harshing Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
Streaming premieres include high-action (in every sense) new seasons of the Mayans MC and Titans, as well as the epic hip-hop history drama, Wu-Tang: An American Saga.
For our vintage cult flick picks, it’s a double-barreled bong-load of head-splattering ’80s horror with the all-time kink-and-gore classic Hellraiser and the slow-burn teenage Antichrist favorite, Fear No Evil.
Marijuana music-wise, punk godfather and drug-culture kingpin Iggy Pop proves he still rules on his latest album, Free, while Post Malone blazes on Hollywood Is Bleeding and Bat for Lashes lights up Lost Girls.
So let’s get straight — but not “straight” — to this week’s fresh-rolled recommendations.
Movies
It: Chapter Two (2019)
Director: Andy Muschietti
Cast: Bill McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader
In the realm of paranoia-inducing pot use, killer clowns reign as absolute kingpins of post-toke terror. That stated, no killer clown has ever frightened lit audiences more ferociously than Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) in 2017’s horrifying Stephen King mega-hit It. Start blazing your bongs in fear now, everybody, because this weekend, Pennywise is back.
It: Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the first flick. The kids who battled the sewer-dwelling circus psycho back in the ’80s are now adults called on to reassemble and finish the job. Somehow, Chapter Two is even more bugged-out and surrealistically sinister than its predecessor. Puff hard, and proceed with caution!
Satanic Panic (2019)
Director: Chelsea Stardust
Cast: Hayley Griffith, Rebecca Romijn, Adren Myrin
As stoner entertainment genres go, horror-comedy ranks high (pun, as always, intended) among the finest form of flicks to pair with pot. Satanic Panic upholds this tradition with a loopy, loony, gloriously gore-sopped saga of a pizza delivery driver named Samantha Craft (Hayley Griffith) whose pepperoni drop-off somehow gets her entangled with demons, witches, and upper-crust devil worshippers hellbent on turning her into a human sacrifice.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2019)
Director: Morgan Spurlock
Cast: Morgan Spurlock
All the way back in 2004, documentarian Morgan Spurlock both amusingly and alarmingly elevated society’s consciousness with Super Size Me, his nonfiction film about what happened to his physical and mental states while consuming nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days.
For weed-smokers, chowing solely on Big Macs and McNuggets for a month is certainly within the realm of possibility. Super Size Me at least gave us some pause for thought between dabbing and hitting the drive-through.
Since then, Spurlock as remained a serious mischief maker and, in Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, he opens his own farm to raise fowl while exposing hugely questionable corporate fast food claims about how they offer healthy options. Just remember: Marijuana itself is a vegan product.
Streaming
Mayans MC: Season 2
Cast: JD Pardo, Sarah Bolger, Edward James Olmos
Watch It: FX
Last year’s breakout biker smash Mayans MC returns with another full-season onslaught of badass beat-downs, machine-gun mayhem, and drug cartel carnage set among outlaw factions on the California-Mexico border.
EZ Reyes (JD Pardo) continues struggling to earn his bones and find his place in the motorcycle gang of the title — even if it means killing a rival with his bare hands to do it (spoiler alert: It does).
Titans: Season 2
Cast: Benton Thwaites, Anna Diop, Teagan Croft
Watch It: DC Universe
Titans, DC Universe’s dank, dark 21st century update of the old Teen Titans comic book series, showcases youthful superheroes such as Robin (Brenton Thwaites), Starfire (Anna Diop), and Raven (Teagan Croft) laying waste to evil with utterly anarchic abandon. Word is that newly lit versions of Wonder Girl (Conor Leslie), Aqualad (Drew Van Acker), and even Superboy (Joshua Orpin) will be teaming up with the other Titans this season. Here’s hoping for an episode where Gotham City legalizes pot!
Wu-Tang: An American Saga: Season One
Cast: Dave East, Erika Alexander, Ashton Sanders
Watch It: Hulu
The Wu-Tang Clan looms so monolithic in both hip-hop history and the overall marriage of music and marijuana, that attempts to dramatize the Staten Island collective’s one-of-a-kind story runs the risk of resulting in something that might have seemed like a good idea while everybody was high.
Fortunately, Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga miraculously rises to the occasion and surpasses even our dopest hopes for a TV series set in ‘90s “Shaolin” could achieve. Of course, it helps that Wu-Tang’s resident genius RZA co-created the show, and, like weed itself, he’s never harshed our buzz yet.
Cult Classic Collectibles
Fear No Evil (1981)
Director: Frank LaLoggia
Cast: Stefan Angram, Elizabeth Hoffman, Kathleen Rowe McAllen
Get It: Shout Factory
The same year the Antichrist went to high school in the big-budget Hollywood production Damien: Omen II (1981), the son of Satan also entered tenth grade in the scrappy grindhouse screamer, Fear No Evil.
The Omen sequel may have been a huge hit, but — powered by a punk soundtrack, whacko religious iconography, and an outrageously over-the-top lead performance by Stefan Arngrim as the teenage Lucifer — Fear No Evil became a VHS rental favorite among bong-passing teens for the rest of the decade. Now, with this special edition Blu-ray, Fear is ripe for reefer-powered rediscovery. Hails, horns, and let’s get higher than Hell!
Hellraiser (1987)
Director: Clive Barker
Cast: Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence, Andrew Robinson
Get It: MVD
Immediately upon impact in 1987, writer-director Clive Barker’s hell-spawned, sadomasochistic occult splatter-orgy mind-fuck Hellraiser shocked the seeds straight out of the stash of even the most hardened horror lovers.
Now, the heroes at Arrow Films have resurrected the original eye-popping chunk-blow freak-out with a super-deluxe Blu-ray collector’s edition worthy of Hellraiser’s elegantly twisted sex-demon anti-hero Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and his leather-glad, body-modified band of bondage mutants, the Cenobites.
If you don’t get baked and let Hellraiser fry your mind anew with this disc, well, as Pinhead himself puts it in the movie, “Your suffering will be legendary — even in Hell!”
Music
Free
By Iggy Pop
Get It: Apple Music
Fifty-plus years after he invented punk, heavy metal, and hard-rock-as-an-extension-of-hard-drugs with The Stooges, narco-nuclear sonic cyclone Iggy Pop unleashes Free, his 18th solo album. As always, Iggy proves — again — that he still packs more wallop than any other human wrecking-ball who has ever even attempted the game — by going arguably weirder than ever. Free is dominated by experimental excursions with spoken word pieces and eerie forays into the avant-garde.
Hollywood Is Bleeding
By Post Malone
Get It: Apple Music
Hot off the heady highs of 2018’s Beerbongs & Bentleys, Post Malone smokes all comers anew with 17 deeply dimensional tracks of his latest LP, Hollywood Is Bleeding. Continuing on the conquest theme, Post also swings steel in the instant classic sword-and-slaying video that accompanies the single “Circles,” and it kind of only feels like a metaphor (especially when watched high). Hotter still, Hollywood includes mega-A-list drop-ins from Young Thug, Swae Lee, SZA, Meek Mill, Halsey, and, on the track “Take What You Want,” Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne!
Lost Girls
By Bat for Lashes
Get It: Bat for Lashes Official Site
Lost Girls is Nastasha Khan’s fifth outing under the moniker Bat for Lashes. It’s also her finest. Inhale deep for this one and then get lost, indeed, in the record’s new-wave-style synth trip into sweet haze, dark dreams, off-putting interludes, and half-remembered/half-smoke-conjured forays through Khan’s ‘80s Los Angeles upbringing.
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