Brothers of the Head (2005, Keith Fulton,Louis Pepe)

"In the 1970s a music promoter plucks Siamese twins from obscurity and grooms them into a freakish rock'n'roll act. A dark tale of sex, strangeness and rock music."

This is a faux documentary made from the 2 guys who made one of the best documentaries on the nature of film, Lost in La Mancha. The writer of this is also the man who gave us the great script to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There is a lot of talent behind this film and it clearly shows on screen.

The film is perfectly made. It looks and feels like it was all done in the 70's. The style is never exaggerated but it is very noticeable. The cinematography is great. Most of the film is told through old "documentary footage" of the two brothers and because of this most of the shots look really rough and handheld. Yet, every shot is pretty damn great and is very stylish. I imagine this was a tough thing to pull off. The whole mixture of making everything look fake but also making it look stylish is remarkable. The musical performances are also a lot of fun to look at and hear.

I wish I could keep writing about how great the film is but I can't. The problem with this film is that it feels empty. You don't care for the brothers at all. I'm guessing that I really didn't care for them because the only thing that we feel bad for is the fact that are conjoined. That's pretty sad I guess but not enough for me to care for them. Every scene that could have added so much layers to these characters is never shown and is instead told through the fake interviews. Instead of these scenes that are described to us, we get a lot of "footage" of the brothers fighting. You would think that by this I mean we get some really dramatic emotional scenes. Instead we just get a lot of scenes of one of the two brothers messing with the brothers. That's right, we get a couple of scenes that feature one brother not letting his brother go to sleep or not letting his brother finish a sentence, These are the scenes that are supposed to be tense and are supposed to add insight to the brothers. They do not at all.

Brothers of the Head is a well made film. It's worth watching just to see how the filmmakers pulled it all off. I just wish that the plot and characters could have had as much attention and detail as the film's style did.

- ***