Joe Bob Briggs' Drive-In Academy Awards 1996!

· BEST SERIAL KILLER
"And the winner is ...Brad Friedman [in] "Dead Boyz Cant Fly,"' as the murdering transvestite who gulps several quarts of pills, engages in a fight to the death with a Vietnam-vet-turned-janitor, gets his throat slit ear to ear, but FINISHES THE MOVIE."

· BEST ACTION FLICK
"And the winner is ..."Dead Boyz Cant Fly,"' the sensitive story of a mama-hating transvestite, a rapist who teaches yo-yo tricks to little boys and a dimwitted, vaguely ethnic hood who team up to terrorize an office building on Memorial Day weekend by blasting their way through the offices of a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist and -- most hated of all -- the guy who runs the EMPLOYMENT AGENCY."

· BEST OVERALL ACHIEVEMENT IN GRATUITOUS DEATH
"And the winner is ..."Dead Boyz Cant Fly"': Mannequin bashing. Death by yo-yo. Nonelective tooth extraction. Dental drilling. The old head-in-the-filing-cabinet torture. Disinfectant in the eyes. Corpse mutilation. CPR with a frayed electrical cord. Bullet through the forehead. Do-it-yourself tourniquet. Throat-slicing. Hanging. Thirteen-story swan dive onto the pavement."

CUTLINE:: Transvestite punk psycho Brad Friedman turns patriotic after getting his throat slit by a crazed Nam-vet janitor.
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
     Speaking of killer geeks, this week's flick is "Dead Boyz Cant Fly," the sensitive story of a mama-hating transvestite, a rapist who teaches yo-yo tricks to little boys, and a dimwit vaguely ethnic hood who team up to terrorize an office building on Memorial Day weekend by blasting their way through the offices of a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, and--most hated of all--the guy who runs the EMPLOYMENT AGENCY. Somewhere along the way, the murdering transvestite gulps several quarts of pills, engages in a fight to the death with a Vietnam-vet-turned-janitor, gets his throat slit ear to ear, but FINISHES THE MOVIE.
     This is one of those New York independent dealies that goes so far off the violence scale that Congressmen stand in line to blame it for the crime rate in the Bronx. There are Mafia hitmen who would throw up if they saw this movie. There's one scene where one of the punks poses as a doctor and "examines" Delia Sheppard that will make women wake up screaming thirty years from now. There's a disgusting scene in an elevator where Marilyn Monroe look-alike Ruth Collins gets molested at knifepoint that goes on and on and ON.
     Of course, I loved it.
     It satisfies the first rule of great drive-in moviemaking: Anyone can die at any moment.
     And it satisfies the second rule: Just when you think you know who's gonna die next, you're WRONG.
     Fifteen dead bodies. Eleven breasts. Mannequin bashing. Death by yo-yo. Non-elective tooth extraction. Dental drilling. The old head-in-the-filing-cabinet torture. Disinfectant in the eyes. Corpse mutilation. CPR with a frayed electrical cord. Bullet through the forehead. Do-it-yourself tourniquet. Throat-slicing. Hanging. Thirteen-story swan dive onto the pavement. Gratuitous topless dancing. Gratuitous hockey mask. Ambulance Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for David John, as the Vietnam vet janitor-by-day, writer-by-night who says "The enemy is here, and he's one of ours"; Ruth Collins, as the bimbo who LAUGHS at the chief punk and doesn't live to tell about it; Jason Stein, as the most normal of the psychos, for saying "You spoiled my day, and now you ruined my evening, bitch!"; Brad Friedman, as the transvestite drughead ringleader who binds and gags his Mama and says "It's what you always wanted--a little girl!" and "I'm a sociopath, lady"; Daniel J. Johnson, as the dim-bulb thug who says "You killed him for nothing!"; and Howard Winters, the producer/director, for doing things the drive-in way.
     Four stars.
     Check it out.
     If you've got the guts for this kind of thing, check out the UNRATED version

   Umm.
When a street thug gets his (admittedly juvenile) artwork laughed at in a sleazy employment agency, he and two cohorts with varying levels of sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies terrorize everyone on that floor of the office building, brutally raping and killing with subhuman abandon.
   That didn't turn out to be much of a b-movie, did it? It was definitely low-budget, and an independent production, and it was chock full of sex and violence... But it wasn't "entertaining" in the common sense of the word. "Nauseating" and "cruel" are the words I would choose instead, not of the filmmaker per se, but of the dead-on characters about whom he chose to make a film.
  Really, this was a character study, mostly of the leader of the thugs, "Goose," with his intense issues with his mother and his twitchy, bipolar mannerisms. Plot wasn't much of an issue, which kept it from really being hackneyed; even the Vietnam vet janitor, who ostensibly "saves the day," doesn't keep anyone from getting killed; he only makes it out alive.
  Good performances all around (except for the police detectives)...
  Hell, I'm dancing around the issue. This movie was damned disturbing, and it was meant to be. There are people like Goose and his friends running around the world, people who seem to have been born without souls. The greed and lust for power which are the normal b-movie bad-guy motivations are clean and fun and easily understandable, but the raw need to inflict pain that these sociopaths exhibited was something alien and shocking. And yet they were written and performed so well that I couldn't help but be captivated by them against my will -- the "fascination of the abomination," so to speak.
  While I applaud the performance of "Goose," I feel sorry for the poor actor who had to subsume himself in such a vile character for the entire production, and I stand in awe of the writer and the director who could immerse himself in such unvarnished brutality for an even longer length of time.
  Only a couple of technical complaints: The vet's stripper girlfriend was completely extraneous, and Goose's slit throat was very obviously fake.
  I'm sorry to any of you who saw this and were clubbed out of the blue; I'll try to screen the movies better for the future.
  Some notable totables (for the unrated director's cut):

• 6 breasts
• 17 killings
• 5 explosions (all in stock footage from Vietnam)
• 2 rapes
• 1 Marilyn Monroe impression
• 1 Marilyn Manson impression
• 1 actor who has appeared on Star Trek
• Scott Thompson Baker, "Officer Adler", appeared on an episode of DS9 in 1998