On The Loose

Goofball lab tech RON visits his shy, hard-up grandfather MARTIN at his retirement home, where perky coed SUZY volunteers. Martin’s hesitant to follow crusty old chum WALT's offbeat advice on how to make old-man moves on shapely Nurse MOLLY. Walt also chides Ron for not making a move on his boss RHONDA, an uptight hot-shot biologist at the Animal Research Lab (ARL) at Island University. Ron’s job is to inject rats with viruses that simulate old-timers’ disease so Rhonda can test her prototype cures on them. One night, protesters from People Emulating Defenseless Animals (PEDA) trick bumbling campus cop RUFUS to let them into the ARL, where they release all the ARL’s frogs, rabbits, cats, rats and E. coli. The Petri dishes, sadly, don’t get too far, and the rats become a fatal feast for lab cats Muffy and Scruffy, but not before an infected rat has bitten one of the lab rabbits, who goes on a biting rampage through Island U. Rabbit-bite victims include Suzy and moronic frat brothers MOE, LARRY, and CURLY. Meanwhile, Suzy’s pushover psych grad student boyfriend Johnny’s meeting with his thesis professor (I. Blowhard) is pre-empted by a visit from swaggering NIGEL, Blowhard’s former student and now the billionaire CEO of Psychosoft. Nigel bribes Blowhard to take on a special project; namely, a series of psychology experiments to confirm that Psychosoft’s new app (think X-rated Pokemon Go) isn’t too engrossing to cause safety concerns for app players. Breaking a past promise to Johnny, Blowhard forces Johnny to execute the Psychosoft "experiments": placing obvious impediments (e.g. cowpies, broken glass, ..) in front of app-addicted students, and recording whether they avoid these hazards. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) Infected students show a variety of unfiltered behavior: Suzy turns from chaste to nymphomaniac, campus orchestra players beat the shit out of each other, and frat boys LARRY, MOE and CURLY – well, they don’t change much, but they’re infected, too. All the campus chaos interferes with Johnny’s experiments, and confuses stoners CHEECH and CHONG, who are puzzled why this “trip” isn’t ending. Noticing the growing outbreak, the stuffy ARL director chews out Rhonda and orders Rufus’s security team to wall off the campus, turning it into a giant zoo, so that they can contain the outbreak and catch all the rogue animals. But students stampeding away from rabbits and ducks crash through the barricades, taking the outbreak to the rest of the island. As Channel 9 ace reporter ASHLEY interviews an ARL professor who assures her that the situation is under control, ANIMALS RUN AMOK IN THE BKG, terrifying passersby. Ron, Rhonda, and their ARL coworkers overrun the PEDA hideout. The PEDA’s negotiate a suspension of animal testing before agreeing to Rhonda’s plan to buy more research time; she leverages their protesting skills to stage a week-long traffic-blockade at the only bridge off the island. Rhonda screens Larry, Curly, and Moe and their frat brothers to be her guinea pigs by showing them a keg of beer surrounded by a force field. Larry, Curly and Moe qualify for the study by running into the force field again and again. Rhonda injects them with prototype cures but none of them work, as the boys walk over hot coals to dance with scantily-clad skanks and fail other tests of self-control. Ron considers injecting Rhonda with the virus to eliminate her hesitation to sleep with him, but drops this plan (and a syringe just inches from her butt) when she thanks him for being such a good friend. The syringe LANDS ON HIS TOE! After failing to suck the injection out with his mouth and the fume-hood vacuum, Ron readies his toe for amputation via a rat guillotine. Just in time, he realizes that he picked the wrong syringe – he only injected himself with a placebo. Meanwhile, Rhonda scoffs at Cheech and Chong’s offer to help her cure the epidemic, assuming they just want to steal chemicals from her lab to feed their drug habit. Ashley fends off an amorous Blowhard with her reporter microphone, but gets infected anyway by the rampaging rabbit. Channel 9 anchor MARY hands out body cameras to her mostly-infected team, so they can report on the growing epidemic. Ashley finds a bitter greeter and sassy clerk at the local Mall-Wart, meteorologist BRAD outs a barista pretending to be gay to pad his tip jar, sportscaster SID gets assaulted for using his phone in a bar bathroom stall, and traffic reporter RICK negotiates dinner-for-sex with a lonely LISA at a local restaurant. Mary argues with her insolent teen about whether to be honest with people, or hold back feelings that may hurt them, as they head to WE BE TOYS to buy a gift for Sid’s kid’s birthday. Mary is infected by a bite inside the store overrun by uninhibited adults, leading to a no-holds-barred interview with Professor Blowhard that devolves into a wrestling match. Meanwhile, Nigel, in his sumptuous office stroking his bobblehead likeness, scolds Johnny for the messy data in his experiments, endangering Johnny's upcoming graduation. Ron runs into Suzy riding Johnny naked in the middle of campus, with oblivious phone-addicted students just walking by. Ron reveals that he’s responsible for Suzy’s new-found nymphomania. Johnny slugs Ron, then realizes that it’s better to team up with Ron to stop the epidemic so Johnny’s experiments can be run properly. Cheech and Chong, who have been following the action all along, help Rufus miraculously catch the biting rabbit, the last rogue animal on his list. But the ARL director, citing their agreement with PEDA, refuses to let Rhonda collect tissue samples from the rabbit that would accelerate the cure – in fact, the director warns Rhonda that she has only one more day of frat-boy testing before that, too, is shut down by the ethics board. To top things off, the bridge blockade appears to be ending, as the PEDA protestors are running out of steam. Cheech impersonates a pizza delivery man to infiltrate the ARL, where he and Chong explain to Rhonda that they need the epidemic cured, because unless the campus is normal, they can’t tell when they are tripping. Desperate, she allows them to help, and they find a breakthrough cure that prevents Curly from walking through a room of bees to get to weed-laced brownies that Cheech has baked in the autoclave. After they celebrate, Ron remembers to shoo the bees off Larry and Moe. Ron negotiates with the ARL director to test the new cure at Martin’s nursing home as a test run for an island-wide cure. Nurse Molly helps Ron and Suzy corral the scatterbrained residents from Bingo into the dining room for Chong to gas them with the new cure, though not before there’s a huge mix-up in which geezers get which daily pills. Racing against time, Johnny tricks Blowhard into admitting his bribe from Nigel. Rufus, who has now bonded with the biting rabbit, handcuffs Blowhard to take him on a wild ride on his golf cart with Johnny and Rhonda through campus to Psychosoft headquarters. They get past Psychosoft’s snotty receptionist, but an undercover security guard is not so easy to overcome, until Rhonda jabs him in the ass with an anesthetic syringe. They burst into Nigel’s office. Nigel refuses to help, until Rhonda feeds Nigel’s bobblehead to the rabbit. He then agrees to re-direct all the Island app users’ “Pokemon” to a common location – the basketball arena on Island’s campus --just in time before the bridge blockade falls apart. Island residents stream into the arena as Chong rolls in gas cylinders through a side door. As we learn from Sid’s Channel 9 reporting at the scene, the arena cure works, with the side benefit of making the cure recipients incredibly relaxed and hungry. The nursing-home cure also works. Nurse Molly rewards Martin’s bravery by slipping him a Viagra thirty minutes before her shift ends.