NOW WE REALLY KNOW WHY THEY CALL IT 'DOPE'

HOW HIGH Starring Method Man and Redman 18A, 94 min.
*

Here's something that will really make your head spin: Jesse Dylan, as
in son-of-Bob.

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 Dany DeVito's production company, Jersey
Films, (Maybe DeVito saw rappers Method Man and Redman smoking 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 theatres a month after The Wash starring rappers Snoop Dogg
and Dr. Dre as stoned car-wash employees.

While that was a 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 boyfirend Bart (Chris Elwood) is the condescending crew
team captain. And Jamal hooks up with Jamie (Essence Atkins),
rebellious daughter of the vice-president of the United States who
eludes the secret service to sneak into bed with him.

For some inexplicible 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 Move,
the year's worst movie. Silas keeps a naked woman in his bed, just so
he can occasionally reach over and smak 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-move-of-the-year
status is its soundtrack of songs by OutKast, DMX, Cypress Hill, and
of course - Method Man and Redman.