Touches You

Good concept, poorly executed.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blistering performances.

While, since L.S.D. is highly illegal and teenagers aren't just getting it these days, it's hard to see this movie as anything but extreme. However, the Sixties and early Seventies, those were the years when peace, love and happiness were all that mattered. The hippie years, when drugs and booze was just available. Alice, age 15, is the girl in this movie who is sort of a shy nerd until she meets a popular girl and gets invited to a party where she accidentally drinks doped soda and joins a group of stoned hippie kids all the time. Soon she's living on the streets doing literally anything to get high again, and this leads her into a dangerous world of sex and abuse until she is finally able to find the courage to call her family and get help.This film is great for nostalgic value alone, and although it seems silly and exaggerated today, L.S.D. was a real problem. It's a drug that causes hallucinations and what appears to be temporary insanity.The soundtrack was amazing, I wish all of it was available on youtube. The acting was pretty good and the movie remained interesting the whole way through. Go Ask Alice was based on a true story and a book as well, Alice is the name given to an anonymous girl who died of an overdose while hooked on drugs. This movie is totally worth watching and very interesting.

This TVM is summed up by the title song . You're hearing White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane except it's not Jefferson Airplane . It's a very good try at a a cover version that embellishes the original song and yet it's not the original song . There's something about it that's different that you can't put your finger on and its the same with this television movie based on a true story And that's it - it's not a true story even though it purports to be . It tells the story of a high school student whose life is overcome by drugs . From the outset you're aware of Alice sounding a little bit too prosaic to be a teenage girl in real life but I've heard the same problem with THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK and no one except a Nazi apologist considers that to be fictional so that's by the by . It does seem strange that the protagonist has a name that ties in with a Jefferson Airplane song but then plenty of songs tie in with peoples name with Theodore being a notable exception . It does seem inconvenient that drugs ruin the life of the protagonist but I'm sure like me we can all give examples of people we've known who have taken drugs , become too involved with them and this had led to blighted lives I've got to stick to my instincts and a little bit of internet searching where anyone investigating the source book has quickly come to the conclusion this is an entirely made up story warning of the potential dangers of drugs . It's a TVM and while nobody in 2013 thinks of turning on the TV and watching a HBO series featuring graphic sex , violence and bad language there were very strict guidelines involving American television in the 1970s that were similar to a Walt Disney film . That said GO ASK ALICE does try its best trying to stay within the guidelines . Hey it's no REQUIEM FOR A DREAM but as family friendly fare middle class middle American screaming that drugs are bad kids it's not ineffective as propaganda

This is an alarmist TV movie based on an alarmist young adult novel supposedly based on the diary of an actual fifteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose. The novel's origins were recently debunked, but anyone with a casual familiarity with drugs ought to realize both the book and the movie are mostly a lot of bunk. For instance, at one point in the book the character becomes a prostitute because she is addicted to LSD. Huh?! First off LSD, can create dangerous delusions and it might melt your mind, but it is NOT addictive. Moreover, it has always retailed for about $1 a hit and any "habit" could be financed by spare-changing for about a half an hourDrugs ARE dangerous, even alcohol and marijuana to some extent, but I don't why people who have obviously never experienced them feel they have to make up ridiculous lies about them to keep kids away. If you tell kids that LSD or marijuana are addictive when they're not, they're not going to believe you about crack or heroin. And while I wouldn't recommend drugs to anybody, I wouldn't recommend going through life being a total tool either.But getting to the movie (which actually leaves out some of the more absurd scenes of the book), I kind of liked it. It has a very groovy 70's feel to it. Being a TV movie it doesn't have nearly enough psychedelic freak out scenes, but it's better than most TV movies, definitely better than the kind they make today. It also feature Ayn Ruymen, a really pretty if obscure actress who appeared in Paul Bartel's "Private Parts" about the same time. Of course, it also was the debut of McKenzie Phillips the first of three completely untalented daughters of John Phillips of the "Mamas and Papas" fame, and if you know anything about THAT family, it's pretty ironic that any of them would have appeared in an anti-drug movie. Still it's good to finally this is available on (legitimate) DVD.

Go Ask Alice is a fraud of a book and an equally fraudulent movie. The book that this weak, inauthentic TV movie was based on was written by a middle-aged British woman pretending to be an adolescent American girl. The language is all wrong: "telly," "mum" . . . it's all ridiculous for starters, plus the effects she ascribes to certain drugs (pot, speed, and LSD, for starters) are obviously based on antidrug propaganda and not on any first-hand experience.OK, now to this pallid attempt at creating a film version of a fraudulent book. Well, shall we talk about the production values? Crappy sets, bad lighting, horrible attempts to simulate the drug experience within the confines of a G-mandated rating and an obvious lack of familiarity with either drugs or even decent cinematic representations of freak-outs (Hitchcock/Dali, Hopper/Fonda). And I guess I don't have to talk about how bad the direction and acting are. That's obvious by looking at the casting and the subsequent credits of the ingenue and the non-cameo actors and actresses.Bad all around--good for a laugh, on a sophomoric level.