Cheech & Chong's Great Car Movie Showing On the Big Screen In Denver, This 4/20 (Naturally)
Some might tell you that Cheech & Chong’s 1978 movie, Up In Smoke, was about Malaise Era drug culture, or Los Angeles, or California punk rock, but in fact it is one of the greatest car movies in cinematic history. For this reason, I have used my Svengali-like powers to convince the management of the Denver Alamo Drafthouse theater to include this fine automotive film as part of the Murilee Martin Presents series. Yes, on Monday, which just happens to be April 20, we’ll roll Up In Smoke starting at 7:30 PM.
In addition to Cheech’s ’64 Impala SS coupe, Sergeant Stedenko’s ’73 AMC Matador, and the Fiberweed™ GMC Value Van, you’ll see more incredible cars than you can count, including the Busted Nuns’ Buick Sportwagon, the Mob Guys’ 1967 Lincoln Continental, and cameos by everything from a Volkswagen 411 to a Fiat 128 Sport Coupe.
The Alamo has food and drink service right at your theater seat (sorry, Sen Dog, there’ll be no smoking your four-footer— or anything else— inside the theater). The show starts at 7:30, but show up a bit early with your interesting hoopties and we’ll have a little impromptu car show in the parking lot beforehand (as we did before we watched Duel a couple weeks back).
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I think that the van they had in Next Movie was a better example of a rolling accessories catalog. Fake bubble window, pull off decals, aftermarket chain steering wheel, sweet wheels and so much more cool shit on that van.
Favorite C&C scene was when they were pulled over and Cop asks for license and regis. , Cheech replies "its in the back of the car man!" Our old 81 Corolla wagon failed MO. state inspect. because my dad had PS pump removed after it failed after 20 years or so. Dad argued that it was still in the car in thick ,native Italian accent "EETs in da back of da CAH". It was in the hatch, but just not attached to the car. Good times.