The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012)

A truly mad concoction, blending 1950s juvenile delinquents, sci-fi melodrama, song-and-dance, and a touch of horror, everything in just the right combination to create an engaging big screen spectacle! This curious and curiously entertaining story involves one Jonathan Xavier and his devoted misfit gang who, incidentally, have been exiled to Earth from the far reaches of outer space. Johnny's former girlfriend Bliss has left him and stolen his Resurrection Suit, a cosmic, mind-bending uniform that gives the owner power over others. Along the way, there will be several highly stylized musical numbers, lots of genuinely humorous dialogue, and a wacky plot-twist or two, all beautifully captured on the very last of Kodak's black-and-white Plus-X film stock.

IMDB 5.5/10 from 332 users

Director: Paul Bunnell
Writer: Steve Bingen, Paul Bunnell, Mark D. Murphy, George Wagner
Actors: Will Keenan, Creed Bratton, De Anna Joy Brooks, Reggie Bannister
Rated: NOT RATED
Runtime: 105 min


Paul Bunnell’s 1950's throwback dials up the weirdness of the already surreal genre of sci-fi B movies with showstopping musical numbers, over-the-top dialogue, and hilariously hokey special effects. Banished to Earth for intergalactic juvenile delinquency, Johnny X and his gang of Ghastly Ones set off in search of a piece of alien technology that could change the fate of the universe forever—the so-called “resurrection suit.” Soon, the extraterrestrial nogoodniks are embroiled in a wacky scheme involving a femme fatale named Bliss, a shifty concert promoter with schemes of his own, and a recently deceased musician who won’t let a little decomposition stop him from rocking. Beautifully photographed on the last of Kodak's 35mm black and white Plus X film stock, the cast includes sexy new stars Will Keenan and De Anna Joy Brooks, as well as seasoned professionals Creed Bratton, Reggie Bannister, Kate Maberly, Paul Williams (Phantom Of The Paradise) and the late Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) in his final role. The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is a truly mad concoction, blending 1950's sci-fi melodrama, song-and-dance, and a touch of horror - a mesmerizing big screen spectacular! The fun begins as Johnny X and his misfit gang of juvenile delinquents from outer space are sentenced to Earth where "ghastly" is the word! With highly stylized musical numbers, tons of genuinely humorous dialogue and wacky plot twists, Johnny X is the only sci-fi dark comedy musical romance you need to see this year! The film opened in a single theater on October 26, 2012 and grossed $86 in the first weekend. At the end of its run (of merely two theaters), the film had grossed $2,436.

Paul Bunnell is a film-maker to whom budget and the art of film-making really matter. "The Ghastly Love of Johnny X" is a tribute to film in both senses of the word, a
paean to science-fiction films of the 1950s and to the benefits of shooting on film rather than with digital cameras. It is a black and white widescreen science-fiction musical about "juvenile delinquents from outer space", which is enough to make it memorable. But what entitles it to an entry in the annals of film history is that it was the final film ever to be shot on Kodak's now discontinued 35mm black and white Plus-X film stock, which had been manufactured since 1938. That made Bunnell's film significant enough for NBC Nightly News to run a feature on it and for the Library of Congress to hold a copy. In a fittingly strange way, America's least successful movie was a victim of its own success. The only reason "Johnny X" was shown in a theater at all was that it won the audience award at the Kansas International Film Festival, where its prize was a week-long run on a single screen at a single local cinema. Will Keenan plays Johnny Xavier, alien leader of gang of teenage toughs who call themselves "The Ghastly Ones." They are expelled from their orderly home planet for constantly kicking up a ruckus and sent to the ghastliest place The Grand Inquisitor can imagine: Earth. (The Grand Inquisitor is, incidentally, the last part ever played by the late Kevin McCarthy, who was Oscar-nominated for his role in 1951's "Death of a Salesman" and starred in the original "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers." His appearance in "Johnny X" is the kind of cameo that would excite Quentin Tarantino.) The Ghastly Ones arrive in a version of 1950's America that seems deliberately littered with anachronisms. The fashions are from the '50s. The cars are from the '60s. There is a rock star;"The Man with the Grin" Mickey O'Flynn, who seems to come from the '70s. We are told he is a member of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, which was founded in the '80s. The camera one of his fans uses to take a picture of him is clearly from the 21st Century.

There is surrealism in even the film's smallest details that recalls something of the work of David Lynch. But in Lynch's films the surrealism is inexplicably unsettling. Here it is inexplicably amusing. When Johnny X's former girlfriend, Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks), persuades square-jawed soda jerk Chip (Les Williams) to take her away from Johnny, Chip drives her to a dilapidated drive-in and talks about the double features he used to see there long ago, before it was abandoned. It is the sort of scene we would expect to see in a wistful drama set, at the earliest, in the 1970s. Chip talks as if the era of the soda jerk and the drive-in movie is lost to the past but at the time the film is set it would have been at its height. As we ponder this, Bliss bursts into a musical number announcing she is an alien who needs Chip's help to escape the extraterrestrial ex-boyfriend from whom she has stolen a magic suit that allows its wearer to control other people like puppets, and promising sexual favors in return. It's that kind of movie. I could tell you the whole plot but you might think I had been drinking. It concerns Johnny's search for O'Flynn, who he knows is his father. (How a musician came to conceive a child with an alien on a distant planet is not disclosed, nor even discussed.) When Johnny finds O'Flynn, O'Flynn is already dead and Johnny is asked to use his special suit to resurrect him so he can put on a comeback concert and save his manager, King Clayton (Reggie Bannister), from the attentions of several unscrupulous loan sharks. By this point, we're about a third of the way through the film. The bizarre joy to be taken in the plot reflects the bizarre joy to be taken in the whole production. All the performances are intentionally absurd. As Mickey O'Flynn, Creed Bratton spends a significant period of the film playing a motionless corpse slumped in an armchair. It's one of the better examples of acting on show. The songs are dreadful and yet, when I woke up the morning after first watching "Johnny X", I had one of them stuck in my head. My lips soon sang along. Francisco Bulgarelli's cinematography is the real triumph: it recreates the peculiar beauty of low-budget 1950s sci-fi films better than any movie I have seen besides Tim Burton's "Ed Wood." The last rolls of Plus-X were not wasted. It is a truth accepted by all but the most humorless film fans that a bad movie can be good fun. This is very bad movie that is very good fun. That it was the lowest grossing film of 2012 and the last film ever shot on Plus-X gives viewers two reasons to seek it out. I hope this review, and the few like it that are dotted across the internet, provide a third. Any film made with this much spirit deserves an audience far bigger than the one it can get by playing on one screen in one theater in Kansas. "The Ghastly Love of Johnny X" is terrible. I loved it.

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