17 Things To Watch On Netflix When You’re Stoned
The best movies and shows to blow your mind, but not your high.
1. Into The Inferno
Werner Herzog and some travel guides risk their lives to get up close and personal with volcanoes in Indonesia, Ethiopia, and North Korea. The results are scary, spiritual, fascinating, and visually nutso. Every pothead's dream. Watch now.
2. Easy, episode 4
The work of mumblecore king Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies, Hannah Takes The Stairs) has regularly intrigued us enough to pull us in, then left us wanting more. His Netflix show Easy, a kind of rom-com anthology set in Chicago, was mostly doing the same. Until episode four, "Controlada," a — dare I say?! — downright sexy bit of filmmaking. It'll make you want to dance, drink, smoke, and screw around. Watch now.
3. Every episode of Unlikely Animal Friends
If your stoner heart doesn’t turn to silly putty when you meet these iconic critter duos — like Roo and Penny, a two-legged Chihuahua and his fluffy chicken BFF — you might actually be a monster. Watch now.
4. Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories
Based on a best-selling manga, Midnight Diner is set in a cozy all-night eatery, and each episode revolves around a regular customer’s favorite comfort food. It’s all about bonding over taste, and the magic mundanity of late-night munchies. The cutest one is a love story called “Omelette Rice." Watch now.
5. Supermensch: The Legend Of Shep Gordon
Supermensch is about how producer and manager Shep Gordon came up in the music world after meeting Alice Cooper in 1968 and subsequently skyrocketing him to fame with boozy, idiosyncratic tactics. There’s also much talk about Shep’s persistent bachelordom (his friends think he should finally settle down). It's campy, full of stoney rock jams, and pairs great with green. Watch now.
6. The Fly (1958)
The original The Fly isn't more gruesome than its 1986 Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis remake, but it’s spookier, thanks to B-horror virtuoso Vincent Price and primordial visuals and sound effects. The final "help me" scene will either be traumatizing or hilarious, depending on what type of pot you've got. Watch now.
7. In The Loop
In this brilliant political farce made by the dude who created Veep, politicians from the two laughingstocks of the Western World (the U.K. and the U.S.) are brought together to have their incompetence ridiculed. Made in 2009, but more relevant now than ever. Watch now.
8. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
A classic case of so-bad-it’s-good: Lizzie McGuire, awkward teen TV hero of the early-’00s, goes to Italy with her senior class and meets a cute Italian boy who teaches her to sing so she can stand in for her pop star doppelgänger at a big concert. Light a joint, crimp your hair, and settle in. Watch now.
9. Upstream Color
Look, it has a plot, and discernible characters, and even something of a love story. But trying to hang on to what's happening at any given moment is a fool's errand. You may well be best served watching it once through, high and passive. Eventually maybe you can even come back to it with an annotated guide. At first though, just enjoy: it is a startlingly beautiful thing. Watch now.
10. Barton Fink
In 1991, the Coen Brothers — then still relative newcomers, albeit with a couple of classics already under their belt — gave us the beguilingly odd Barton Fink. There's infidelity and epic arson, alcoholism and bloody rage, abuse and decapitation. And almost all of it takes place in the preposterously grimy hotel that Fink has holed up in to write (or quite possibly, in Fink's mind). Paranoia, the creative spark, horniness, weird jokes: weed dreams are made of this. Watch now.
11. 10 Things I Hate About You and 12. How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days
13. Snake Eyes
As Ethan Hawke, my fellow Nicolas Cage-Head, once said, "If I could erase his bottom half bad movies, and only keep his top half movies, he would blow everyone else out of the water. Brian De Palma's fight-night-slash-international-security thriller Snake Eyes, is not quite canon Cage. But it is nutso and nonsensical and nonstop. And it does flash lots of the basic raw stuff that makes up my man Nic's greatness: the willingness to, at any point, fling himself into a plate glass window. Watch now.
14. It Follows
It is our official, professional, and unbiased opinion that It Follows is one of the best horror films in recent memory, maybe of all time. It’s as visually stunning as it is hair-raising, and its monster is artfully socially-relevant — and we all know deciphering symbolism works best when you’ve got weed brain. Watch now.
15. The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is the OG Black Mirror. A couple of the most spine-chilling episodes are: “The After Hours” (1960) set in a creepy department store, and “Twenty-Two,” (1961) a low-budget ep in which a woman dreams every night that she is walking down a narrow hallway towards her grave. Watch now.
16. Adventures In Babysitting
The opening sequence of Adventures In Babysitting, in which Elisabeth Shue preps for a doomed date while dancing to best-song-of-all-time contender “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals, is straight-up legendary. Hit a bong and turn it on; even if you’re too baked to make it through the rest of this hopelessly charming late-’80s Chicago classic, you’ll be glad you saw that scene. Watch now.
17. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the Nation Lampoon
The National Lampoon magazine — and the films and theater it inspired — were transgressive, subversive, and ridiculously funny. This 2015 documentary is all of those things, too — an irreverent history lesson for all the "fairly well-to-do nobodies" out there. Especially the stoned ones. Watch now.
Thumbnail image by Leah Mandel