Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics

As goofy as it is good-natured, “Good Trip” aims to entertain, not educate, as it presents a star-studded parade of celebrity reminiscences about taking hallucinogenic drugs. Mostly, it succeeds.

It’s flippant and glib, sure. But there are too many dead people in it for it to make its “so very safe” point.

While Have a Good Trip tries really, really hard to not fall into the usual traps that make putting hallucinatory experiences on screen look silly, it can’t help itself.

Those looking for much in the way of real insight will find this amiable enterprise doesn’t stray very far from a general, standard-stoner-yuks tenor of “OMG I was SO HIGH!!!”

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

With no real thesis or through-line, the movie winds up being little more than a series of revue-style blackout sketches, lengthy digressions and dead ends.

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

This offers up some cheesy graphics, along with fascinating (and sometimes scary) tales of celebrities taking LSD.

My expectations were higher than what I got. If you have nothing to do it's an o.k. but nothing more than that. Especially the poor graphics were painfully cheap and far from anything real. DMT wasn't discussed in any way expet for one short mention. The interviews were o.k. but due to the fact that they crammed in 7 or 8 people within 90 minutes gave this movie/docu an incomplete and rushed feel.

Psychedelics are amazing. A film that is a badly researched podcast episode that was filmed is not. A bunch of celebrities share stories about being high, and guess what, it's different for different people. The interesting parts are about how psychedelics work, but that's a 5 minute youtube video in the middle of an excruciating 75 minutes of stories told badly. Ya gotta get good storytellers for these kind of stories, and Sting clumsily trying to explain helping a cow give birth is as cringey as it sounds.

While the rediscovery of psychedelics is a great and necessary thing, this "documentary" is not helping. At all. First of all it is a very lazy piece of filmmaking, no structure, just interviews of famous people who dropped acid. A good number of them explaining how they drove cars while tripping or how they mixed psychedelics with many other drugs. Then, there is almost no valuable information about psychedelics, only these celebrities describing their trips and rehashed skits poking fun at 80's after school specials. In the middle of this mess, Dr Grob (a respected researcher in the use of psychedelics) makes an appearance providing 2/3 minutes of adult supervision and genuinely interesting information. So while the intention of rehabilitating psychedelics is good, this movie does it in the worst way possible. That being said, it was cool seeing Anthony Bourdain again...