That's right. I'm following my review of Mummy's Boys with a review of a movie called Daddy's Boys. Stay tuned for my review of Uncle's Boys in a few weeks. (I won't be doing this.) As longtime readers of this blog (all five of you) know, I started this site to review every movie in Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen book. When I finished that, a reader suggested I tackle Rue Morgue magazine's similar list of overlooked horror. That task taken on and completed, I upped the ante by attempting to watch and review every movie in both volumes of The Official Splatter Movie Guide and The Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror, though I will have to seriously pick up the pace after I retire (hopefully in a decade) to get through it all before I die. I alternate movies from each of the three books, so it's a weird and wild coincidence that Daddy's Boys directly follows Mummy's Boys.
In another weird coincidence, the star and screenwriter of Daddy's Boys, Daryl Haney, also wrote the screenplay for the movie I reviewed before Mummy's Boys, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller called Crime Zone. Daddy's Boys is pretty much the same movie as Crime Zone, with the post-apocalyptic urban future swapped for Depression-era rural California. Both movies were made in 1988 and feature average Joes with checkered pasts trapped in criminal groups they've outgrown. The characters in both criminal groups are broadly drawn caricatures. Both male leads fall in love with sex workers. Both couples go on the run and resort to robbery to survive, which makes them local folk heroes in the process. Both movies also have surprisingly downbeat endings for the late '80s, and both were produced by Roger Corman.
Like Crime Zone, Daddy's Boys is not particularly great yet is strangely watchable, and it's injected with enough weirdness to keep it intermittently interesting. Oddly, Daddy's Boys is a rare directorial effort from cult screenwriter Joseph Minion, who I wish had also written this movie. Minion wrote the screenplays for Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Nicolas Cage tour-de-force Vampire's Kiss, 10-year-old-boy-steals-a-car road movie Motorama (aired often on Bravo in the mid-'90s, back when it was an arts and indie film channel), and episodes of Amazing Stories and Tales from the Crypt. His only other feature directing credit is 1999's obscure Trafficking, a shot-on-16-mm Los Angeles private eye movie he also wrote that sounds pretty fascinating. Minion, in a 1998 Indiewire article, called Daddy's Boys "a piece of shit, but I have a fond spot in my heart for it." That sounds about right.
Daddy (veteran character actor Raymond J. Barry) was a corn farmer in Oklahoma until the Depression and his wife's death turned him into a sociopathic bank robber and killer with a religious bent and a hatred for the rich (I'm with him on that last one). Daddy and his three sons travel the country, robbing rural banks, camping in the woods or staying in motels when they have the bread. The oldest son Jimmy (screenwriter Daryl Haney) is tiring of the life, sick of being under Daddy's thumb and having to spend time with his two idiot brothers, the hulking Otis (Christian Clemenson) and the perma-bedhead doofus Hawk (Dan Shor, better enjoyed in Strange Behavior and as Billy the Kid in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) (another Bill & Ted alum, Robert V. Barron aka Abraham Lincoln, plays evil banker Axelrod; party on, dudes). Otis and Hawk are ridiculously broad characters. I wish the movie had made them menacing instead of stupid.
When Jimmy finally gets the chance to escape his family, he jumps on it, though it's unfortunately after Daddy makes all four of them get a tattoo of a corn cob on their arms. He ends up at the roadside whorehouse of Madame Wang (Ellen Gerstein), a white woman pretending to be Chinese for some reason even though everyone can see through it. Jimmy spends some time with sex worker Christie (Laura Burkett). After making a poor first impression, he eventually wins her over, and the two fall in love and plot their escape. The lovers go on the run, robbing banks under the name Adam and Eve and developing a regional celebrity. Daddy and his other boys hear the news and decide it's time to get Jimmy back in the fold. Daddy also has a dark and demented plan to get a home of the family's own and a new wife that can give him more children. I think you can see where this is going.
Though the movie is no great shakes and Minion's direction is mostly perfunctory, the action is paced well and there are quite a few enjoyably oddball lines of dialogue that I'm guessing Minion may have punched up, based on the more standard-issue dialogue from Crime Zone. Even a hit-and-miss B-movie like this one has a lot more personality and flavor than the majority of A-movies.
Based on my image search, I'm starting to think Daddy's Boys is either the most unpopular or the most obscure movie I've reviewed on this site. I couldn't find any film stills other than the title screen, and the only other photos I could scrounge up were some international VHS and laser disc covers, a promotional photo with two of the actors, and a German poster. It was also one of the hardest movies for me to track down. Videos were out of print, it wasn't streaming, it's not currently on YouTube (other than the trailer and the first five minutes), and the rare used VHS copies on Amazon and eBay were going for ridiculously high prices. A popular Australian short horror film and several gay porn movies using the same or a similar title also make searching more difficult than it should be. I ended up buying a DVD rip of the VHS from the same person I got Mummy's Boys from. They must think I'm a lunatic.
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