Hey! Tell you what, lets create a board game based around Mexican drug running cartels! That'd a be a great game for all the family. Beat The Border was published by the appropriately named Border House Ltd., in 1971. A game for 2-4 players, where your job is to buy kilos of drugs from over the border and then sell them on back in the United States at profit. The aim of the game to make as much money as possible from your drug dealing. 

Think Breaking Bad the board game... Where you start with $1000 seed money to buy your drugs. Nip over the border, do a deal with Edwardo, Renaldo, Jose, etc... Then get back over the border without being detected, so you can sell them on in cites across the United States.

If you're carrying kilos you can be busted by various U.S. government agencies. But there are additional things you can buy throughout the game to help you get away with your new business venture, like dodgy lawyers and fake I.D.'s. You play the game until one player reaches the pre-set financial goal, usually around $25,000 to $100,000, as the suggested limit of the game rules. So get your big bad  Heisenberg on and see if you can Beat The Border!

Take a creepy opera singing Christian ventriloquist, add a surreal cast of characters, truly trippy graphics, and put it all on a Public Access cable TV channel, and you are somewhere towards the complete package of madness that is puppeteer David Liebe Hart's world.

Hart himself claims to have been one of the first Afican-Americans to have been abducted by aliens. The nature of their mission was revealed to him by one alien that looked like Bettie Page, named Jezebel. Who also took the form of a giant insect.  

Aside from the puppets, there's a strange cast of human characters that join Hart in the show. These include Count Smokula, the accordion playing vampire that smokes cigarettes on screen, and a variety of seemingly whacked out musicians, in costumes and masks. Including the guitarist in the alien mask, which is more than enough to give any kid nightmares. Making Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson, a show that has gained a cult status, and has to be seen to be believed.

The syrup was widely sold both in the UK and the United States. It wasn't until 1911, when the American Medical Association published a book, naming and shaming quack remedies and snake-oils. In a section called "Baby Killers", Mrs. Winslow and her syrup were rightly named and shamed. However, the syrup remained on sale in the UK until 1930. Which means that the parents were still spoon feeding this laudanum for kids, to their children, long after the dangers of opium and alcohol being mixed, were considered dangerous for adults.

The Car That Ate Paris (1974): Known as The Cars That Ate People, in the Unites States, it's a horror comedy from Peter Weir. The people of a small out-back Australian town of Paris, make there living by causing car accidents for anyone passing through. Then looting the cars, getting rid of the dead, and sending the survivors to the local hospital to be experimented on. The young people of the town use the parts of the cars to make modified monster vehicles, designed for destruction. Tensions between the older townsfolk and the young rebels, boils over into a climatic scene of car carnage. 

The movie was Weir's first low-budget feature film, and wasn't successful on its initial release, but quickly gained a cult following. It's influences can be seen in later movies, such as the Roger Corman productions Death Race 2000 (1975), the original Mad Max and the second movie on our double-bill Dead End Drive-In (1986). Weir would go on the next year to direct the classic of Australian cinema Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and eventually moving to Hollywood to make a number of highly acclaimed movies, including 1998's The Truman Show.

Dead End Drive-In (1986): Dystopian horror, set in a world where roaming gangs of disillusioned young people steal car parts, as cars are seen as a vital commodity in the future society in chaos. In an attempt to curb the crime-wave, authorities force young people into drive-in cinemas, where they are fed a steady diet of junk food, drugs, exploitation films and 80s "new wave" music. Many are happy with this, and come voluntarily. Some are forced into staying, against their will. Though there are obvious parallels with The Car That Ate Paris, a key difference with Dead End Drive-In is the how the youth are depicted. Here the majority are happy to be fed a consumerist junk diet. The anti-authoritarian rebellion of the 70s, turns into an conformist nihilism by the 80s.

Dead End Drive-In is a full-on piece of Ozpolitation cinema, featuring sex, drugs, violence, car chases and bad 80s music. But underlying its bad- b-movie credentials, is the social commentary on racism, violence and nihilistic attitudes of segments of Australian youth at that time. Something that was examined in the 1992 Australian drama starring Russell Crowe, Romper Stomper. 

Curious Alice is a genuine what-where-they-thinking PSA from 1971. Created by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it's just about the most tripped-out 12 minutes you'll ever see. Rather than turn you off drugs, it would send you running to your nearest dealer to get loaded, so you could watch it all again. Although aimed at kids, it has become cult viewing among stoners.

The characters Alice encounters are just precious. Of course we have the pot smoking Caterpillar, jeez even the Disney version has that cool dude drawing on his bong! But here we also have the heroin pushing King of Hearts, waving a giant loaded syringe around. And that's all before Alice gets to the "tea party", where we meet the tweaking speed freak, the Mad March Hare, the downer Dormouse and the acid-head Mad Hatter.

Top Ten: Weird Alice In Wonderland Movies - From the early days of silent cinema, via musical porn and surrealist European cinema to Japanese anime. We certainly ain't talking Disney here.

Alice In Wonderland At Weeki Wachee 1964 - The bizarre underwater ballet theme park in Florida, that was one of the top tourist attractions in the United States in the 1950s.

In 1993 seminal Beat Generation writer and infamous heroin junkie William S. Burroughs recorded a spoken word record with seminal Grunge Rock musician and infamous heroin junkie Kurt Cobain. The record was based on Burroughs short story The "Priest" They Called Him. Burroughs provides a dead-pan delivery, with Cobain provides a dissonant guitar backing based on "Silent Night" and "To Anacreon In Heaven". Originally released as a limited edition 10-inch picture disc in July 1993, the same month that Cobain had a heroin overdose. 

The story of The "Priest" They Called Him first appeared in Burroughs 1973 short story collection Exterminator!, and has a similar feel to his other short story The Junky's Christmas from 1989.

The "Priest" is an otherwise nameless heroin addict trying to score a fix on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day in the Junky's story. The young man of the Junky's story is here a Mexican boy, and instead of returning to his room to receive an "immaculate fix" for his charitable act, the "Priest" lies back on his bed and dies.

Interestingly Burroughs had a role in the 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, playing Tom the Priest.