Brothers of the Head

Most mockumentaries are humorous affairs, but while director Keith Fulton's Brothers of the Head takes satiric jabs at all sorts of targets—the music business, moviemaking, documentary filmmakers, even medical experts—the tone here is rather bleak. The film centers on British brothers Tom and Barry, gangly teen Siamese twins joined at the chest, who are recruited and turned into a dismally untalented punk-rock duo called Bang-Bang by a music promoter who hires a backup band to train them. The young men, who have decidedly different personalities—Tom quieter and more sensitive, Barry wilder and reckless—share a somewhat twisted love-hate relationship awash in drugs and booze, until the arrival of a female reporter with whom Tom begins a romance. In true rock cliché style, the woman's presence brings on a self-destructive spiral that leads to the collapse of the band and, ultimately, tragedy. The tale is told in roughly chronological sequence, parroting all the techniques of documentary filmmaking—with stills, interviews, faux recreations, and even scenes from an “unfinished” movie that Ken Russell (who appears in interviews) is supposed to have started—but it's ultimately too slick and garish by half to be convincing. While Brothers of the Head has a certain ghoulish power and its mixture of black humor and weird poignancy carries an undeniable visceral punch, in the final analysis it comes across as a pretty creepy gag. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras include 14 deleted scenes (67 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a lot of cutting room floor footage, but not much else, for this disturbing mockumentary.] (F. Swietek)