Just as subtlety has gone from real life ,so has it gone from the movie musical (whenever the form infrequently rears its head at the box office). Watching the films of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Stanley Donen is peering into a sublime and lost world of grace and elegance now dead and gone. Nowadays musicals don't have time for emotion and meaning and quiet reflection. The musical numbers are all stylized smashups of intensive cavorting and rictus grins with badly synced vocal tracks, pummeling the audience with phony joy and caffeinated energy like a group of ADHD kids without their medications. You come out of films like Moulin Rouge, Rent, and Hairspray like you just ran a marathon, with your heart racing and grasping for an oxygen tank.

In Andy Fickman's Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical -- a camp spoof of the turgid 1936 exploitation movie Reefer Madness -- this contemporary musical disease is seen in its most virulent form. Relentlessly upbeat and crazed, with hyperventilated numbers and over-the-top acting, the film makes the original Reefer Madness look like The Cherry Orchard.

Taking place in a black-and-white 1936, an intimidating lecturer (Alan Cumming, reconstituting his Master of Ceremonies role from the stage revival of Cabaret) instructs concerned parents in a high school about the evil effects of marijuana on their kids by showing the film Tell Your Children to the uptight 'rents. The film (in color) within the film details the rise and fall of a cute and upstanding couple of high schoolers -- Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell) and Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) -- who are very much in puppy love until Jimmy is given a doobie by a cool, nefarious pusher (Steven Weber). One puff sends Jimmy spiraling out of control and quickly Jimmy becomes a raving pothead. When Mary seeks out Jack in his little den of depravity, Mary is compelled to take a puff herself by resident lunatic Ralph (John Kassir) and the two little lovebirds take the high road to tragedy.

Fickman channels Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors in his staging of the action and he accentuates the unreality of the piece, putting it all over with wide-eyed brashness and high octane pep. But for Fickman the Little Shop of Horrors influence is stuck on the "Somewhere That's Green" number, where Audrey envisions a dream world and Oz takes her there -- at least until the end of the song. Fickman uses this structure in most of the musical numbers in Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical. The audience is not given the chance to enjoy the numbers because Fickman flashes out of the musical sequences and into nightmare worlds of rampaging zombies, sultry tango dancers, Polynesian orgies, a Las Vegas lounge act starring Jesus Christ, a zippy cartoon involving the humping of a brownie, and an S&M bondage routine. After the few numbers winging their way to ultra-fantasy, it becomes predictable and boring. But even within the framing portions of the crazy house hallucinations, Fickman is fidgety and can't rest too long on a shot to showcase the performers. He has to cut to close-ups, floor angle shots, overhead shots -- anything except keeping still and letting the performers perform.

But there are saving graces to compensate for the over-emphatic exuberance. The performers give it their all -- particularly Campbell, Bell, Cumming, and Ana Gasteyer as Jack's moll Mae. And Kevin Murphy's lyrics have a snap that shocks you out of your gag-gag stupor. (Lines like "The fun sometimes escapes me/When Jack gets stoned and rapes me" demand your full attention.)

Another lyric points up the problems of the film -- "It's destructive but seductive." And this is what Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical should have been -- overweening bad taste stacked up high like a tower and ladled on with gusto. Instead, the film is harmless and toothless. With all the tub-thumping, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical turns out to be nothing else but cute.

The DVD also offers Grassroots: Behind the Scenes; commentary by creators Andy Fickman, Dan Studney, and Kevin Murphy and cast members Christian Campbell and Amy Spanger; a photo gallery, cast bios, and the original 1936 Reefer Madness (in case you want to do a comparative study).