Mike Wilson (Russ Tamblyn) goes undercover as Tony Baker to get inside a high school narcotics operation. His cover is that he lives with Gwen Dulaine (Mamie Van Doren) who acts as his aunt but really wants to seduce him. He keeps his cover, which means he’s some kind of robot, because living with Mamie Van Doren who wants to sleep with you at every opportunity seems like the kind of life some men dream of their entire existence, you know?

Mike also has some romantic moments with a student — Joan Staples (Diane Jergens) — and a teacher — Arlene Williams (Jan Sterling) — but he’s more interested in getting the guy pushing all the marijuana in school who is known as Mr. A (Jackie Coogan).

The thing about this movie is that the cops are all squares and all of the really cool people are on drugs. So yes, the makers of this movie — director Jack Arnold and producer Albert Zugsmith, the man who director Dondi — erred on the side of making an entertaining movie, even if Zugsmith wanted nudity. Indeed, the European version of this movie has Jan Sterling topless when Tamblyn calls her on the telephone and a girl in the throes of heroin withdrawal showing her breasts.

If you listened to any White Zombie, you’ll recognize the beat poetry read by the character played by Phillipa Fallon, who was also in Zugsmiths’s The Girl In the Kremlin and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, which goes like this:

“My old man was a bread stasher all his life. He never got fat. He wound up with a used car, a 17-inch screen and arthritis. Tomorrow is a drag, man, tomorrow is a king-sized bust. // They cried, “Put down pot. Don’t think a lot.” For what? Time how much and what to do with it. Sleep, man, and you might wake up diggin’ the whole human race, givin’ itself three days to get out. Tomorrow is a drag, pops, the future is a flake. // I had a canary who couldn’t sing. I had a cat that let me share my pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat that ate the canary. What is truth? // I had an uncle with an ivy-league car. He had life with a belt in the back. He had a button-down brain. Wind up a belt in the mouth and a button-down lip. // He coughed blood on this earth. Now there’s a race for space. We can cough blood on the moon soon. Tomorrow is dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-sized drag. // Hula fast shorts, swing with a gassy chick, turn on to a thousand joys, smile on what happened, then check what’s gonna happen, you’ll miss what’s happening. Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum. Tomorrow, drag.”

That sample appears on La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1, as does the Columbus speech at the start of the movie and the lines “Do you want to start a rumble?” and “Drop it, buster!”

Not only does this movie have Jerry Lee Lewis do the theme song, he shows up to sing it.

I love this movie. I love it so much I nearly missed Michael Landon showing up in it, but I was concentrating on all the kids just openly smoking joints and, well, thinking about Mamie Van Doren.

You can watch this on YouTube.