Customer Reviews

Sonny Boy [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

SONNY BOY is one of the oddest movies I've ever seen. Is it a satire or a thriller or a dessert noir or a horror flick or a crime flick or just a really demented melodrama? Who cares, its a load of fun no matter how you see it.

The film opens with a young couple who are carjacked & robbed in the New Mexico dessert & ultimatley murdered by Weasel, played by Brad Douriff in his most paranoid performance (& thats saying something). Doriff takes the car to his crime boss, a 300 lb gorilla named Slue (played by genre vet Paul L Smith) (...). They go through the contents of the car & realize that the couple Weasel murdered were parents as they discover a sleeping baby & realize they can get top dollar for a healthy white baby on the black market...those plans are foiled though when Slue's daughter Rose hears the baby crying & demands to be able to keep it.

What is so strange here is that Rose is played by David Carradine. Yes you read right, Carradine plays a woman in a housedress, makeup & wig. The character is not a drag queen either & is recognized & is treated as a woman by all of the other characters.

And thats not the wierdest thing about the film.

The pathologically meanspirited Slue lets Rose keep the baby one one condition; that the kid be put to work. Which means that the kid, christened "Sonny Boy" is trained to be an attack dog & secret weapon. His tongue is removed so that he cannot talk back & he is routinely beaten & burned to toughen his flesh. He's kept in a silo most of the time & is fed raw meat. He is only let out "to work" which entails Slue siccing Sonny Boy on his enemies...Sonny Boy rips apart & cannibalizes Slue's enemies.

Due to Slue's rep, his "secret weapon" & his arsenal of howlitzers which he fires at any approaching lawman or wayward motorist that approach his ranch he becomes quite rich. Slue is also a demented art aficianado & aspiring artist. He keeps all of his swag--stolen TVs, cars, appliances, etc organized in pyramids or oddly entralling patterns thoughout his dessert ranch.

And thats just the first half hour before the film gets REALLY
strange!! I haven't even mentioned the vigilante big haired girl with the braces on rotted teeth, Conrad Janis as an alchoholic former doctor who lost his license due to bizzare human experiments or Slue's idea for his masterpiece of crime.

The film's dessert sets look great & the cinematography is remarkably crisp & imaginative for a film with such a low budget...I assume the budget was low because I cannot imagine major money going into it but the film's look doesn't betray its budget. The actors all play it straight as neither they nor the filmmakers ever mug for the camera. The film is told in a straightforward way & never tries to play up the wierdness of the script, not that it needs any help.

The film ends rather abruptly--the story is over but the last details are told in voiceover with a freeze frame on one of the charcaters. It turns out that what happened was that a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures was producing the film & when execs at Columbia got a look at the film they panicked & shut down production, even though it was almost finished. Prints of the film & bad VHS copies became hot commodities as news of this bizzare little gem buzzed around the then robust underground film 'zine world. I ordered one of the lousy VHS bootlegs from the late great GORE GAZETTE & was floored.

SONNY BOY finally got a limited theatrical release in the early 1990s by stregnth of the underground word of mouth & by a review that Janet Maslin, former chief film critic of The New York Times, wrote. She found the film to uttimatley be a failure but found it fascinating & admitted she had to see it twice just to make sure she actually saw what she thought she saw. It was released on VHS but is now out of print, another victim of the Media Home Entertainment debacle. Every once in a while it turns up on late night pay cable. Perhaps now that David Carradine is getting mainstream recognition again thanks to KILL BILL there is hope for a DVD release of this demented classic. I'll be first on the list on Amazon.com's list!

I just finished this movie a few minutes ago and I just sat there for a good five minutes stunned and thought I just lost my mind. Whenever I see something horrible I will be very profuse about it. When I see something really brilliant I become even more animated and can churn out glowing reviews in a matter of seconds. But after seeing this one. . . my mind went totally blank. Suddenly I can't summon enough words to express my gratitude for having stumbled onto this one. I can't believe there are still people in Hollywood who are capable of making mind-blowing movies like this. And, yes, just like the New York Times reviewer who hav=d to see the movie again jsut to be sure he saw what he just saw. . . excuse me, I really have to see the movie again. Never mind the rotten reviews. This is is unbelievably off the top mark. Way too brilliant for cheap words like mine. Go see it!

Hollywood. . . there is hope for you, after all.

DO NOT BE DISSUADED FROM MAKING YOUR OWN DECISION ABOUT THIS MOVIE BY THE VERY NEGATIVE REVIEW POSTED HERE. IF YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY AND ENJOY EXTREMELY OFF THE WALL CINEMA, THIS IS A MUST SEE. THE POSITIVE REVIEW POSTED GIVES YOU ALL THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TO DETERMINE WHETHER THIS ONE IS FOR YOU OR NOT.

BY THE WAY, CARRADINE'S CHARACTER IS A WOMAN, NOT A TRANSVESTITE, AND HE PULLS IT OFF MARVELOUSLY!

Well, at first when I saw this on TCM (Underground) last Friday I thought it would be more of a mainstream cult movie, you know the type kinda like "Nightmare Honeymoon", and I guess in a since it's sort of that kind of film, but a heck of a lot more 'CRAZY'! My first impression of this film was Oh My God!, but in retrospect I can see how great it really was. It's a very sad film, It's about a small town criminal named Slue (played by Paul L. Smith), and his 'wife' Pearl (played by David Carradine), who raise a boy that they get by pure 'chance'. They raise the boy (Sonny Boy) to be the perfect criminal coconspirator, but Sonny Boy (played by Michael Griffin) isn't interested in a life of crime, and eventually finds love. I must say that this film is perfect for the dysfunctional family, and David Carradine in drag is just hilarious, but he did make a good woman...

It's one of the worst movie I saw in my life. Actors are David Carradine who plaid a transvestite (howz that ?) David was the guy who plaid in the famous old serie Kung Fu for those who don't remember. I guess we can't make more ridiculous than David Carradine in a dress and wearing a wig. The other main actor is Paul Smith, the big sadistic warden from Midnight Express. I can't believe how the acting is so bad, howz the story is so crap and creme de la creme, the soundtrack ! Oh my god, it's SOOOO BADDDD. The weak story tells about weirdos who raise the promitive way, Sonny boy.If you see this flick, avoid it. Not funny, not creepy, no quality !