The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2013)

Everyone Needs to see This Movie!! I've never in my life seen A musical so Awesome! It's so Ghastly Awesome! Johnny X is so Amazing! I love this Movie so Much. I loved the whole 50s retro style with Delinquency Johnny X and His Alien Gang saving Mankind. Best Sci fi comedy/Musical I've seen. I loved the singing and Dancing 50s style. The 50s style singing and Dancing made the movie so much more Awesome! And cool! I loved it! And loved that it was filmed Black and white it fit well with the 50s style. More fun and retro. Great storyline very well scripted! The Movie Kept me entertained and Laughing the whole Movie. I want to Join Johnny X and be A Ghastly one. Johnny X is Amazing! Watch this Movie!

I've read many reviews and their reasoning as to why The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is a bad movie. First of all, I have to ask, at what point does this film try and take itself seriously, and if and when it does, what is the motivation behind it? This question should be asked and answered before a dismissive judgment be made on this film. I feel as if I need to defend this film because I see what can only be described to my eyes as "sheep mentality" in regards to this film. The bottom line is that this movie works on what it set out to do. As far as I am concerned, this film wanted to look good (check). This film wanted to be an atmospheric and campy Comedy Sci-Fi Musical(check, and this film wanted to tell a morality tale without getting too heavy handed (CHECK!) In the process, if one decides they can not relax enough to sit back and make an honest effort to stop picking things apart and to truly just let the movie transport you to the world it has set out to create (successfully), then it is simply not a movie for the spectator. And not every thing is for every body. Fair enough. No need to take a sprinkle on the experience, just move on. Maybe I am blind, but I cannot see anything that would be considered offensive here. Quite the opposite, actually. But to condemn this film for "trying to be this film, or that film", is just dumb. At no point did I find myself wanting to throw rice at the screen or sing along. I simply enjoyed a lighthearted musical Sci-Fi that not only entertained me and put me into a mood that 99% of modern films never can, but also saw a film that had enough balls to agitate the gravel enough to keep the viewing experience from being Disney without crossing the line into Argento or Corman.Thank you, film makers! Thank you for using a beautiful collection of lenses to capture this great film, thank you for using a deep, nicely contrasted black and white look and thank you for taking it on the chin when you took this project out into this ungrateful climate of supposed film lovers. It didn't aim to be Gone With The Wind, so WHY does it have to be Gone With The Wind? It didn't aim to be The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so why is it being compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show?Now that's what I call "REAR PROJECTION"!"The Ghastly Love of Johnny X" IS a modern day Classic and like many Classics, it will take time for most people to "get it".It's not the best movie ever made, not by a long shot. It simply is a great movie that does what it says. The title is not misleading. It is a simple, goofy, beautifully shot, corny, campy sci fi musical morality tale action picture that is meditative at the same time it takes getting there.

I had the absolute pleasure of watching The Ghastly Love of Johnny X with Will Keenan the other night. In this world of mostly unoriginal garbage and reboots coming out of Hollywood, this was a very refreshing treat. It has everything you want in a movie. There's love. There's tragedy. There's comedy. There's song and dance numbers. There are plenty of crazy bad special effects. There's rambunctious youth running wild. It IS the total package. It reminded me (just a hint) of Rocky Horror and it has a lot of MST3K type moments in it. Anyway, if you are looking for something really fun - check this film out. Support the "B" movie people!!

All great art comes from love. It also comes from taking chances. Sequels have strangled the movie industry in recent decades. Studios have shrunk from the risks of originality, and this absence of a creative spark has made the movies feel dry as a result. Movies too often center around repetitive gimmicks, rather than newness. Enter "Johnny X": a unique combination of musical, drama, comedy, sci-fi, horror and romance, all coexisting on the screen just as they can in real life. At last we have a vital, oxidizing, verdant offertory to the movie industry. Johnny X is highly original, takes chances and no matter how many gadgets are whirring away at any given time, there is always a warm undercurrent of a story about people. Johnny X is also shot in black and white, which creates a welcome aura of hominess, both by recalling the chiaroscuro beauty of this art form, and by redirecting our focus to the inner world - where meaningful human complexity truly exists.The film begins with our protagonist, Johnny X, played with slicked back, leather jacket coolness by Will Keenan, who wields enough big screen toughness to hold our attention; enough reserve to suggest that he is really a hero experiencing inner conflict; and enough subtle cuteness to suggest that there really is a good guy underneath. Johnny's story is one we all know, because we have either lived or seen it ourselves: he suffers from the emotional malnutrition of parental neglect, and his plight has had a negative effect upon his behavior. And, as if to rearrange his life with a hint of gangland social structure, he has replaced his missing family with a surrogate clan: a roving pack of similarly wounded rebels named "the Ghastly Ones," who channel pain in to renegade badness. In a touching and eloquent final performance given by screen legend Kevin McCarthy, we are introduced to the Ghastly Ones: a universally recognizable pack of disenfranchised youth. It is through their eyes, so blankly staring out through black jail house hoods, that our journey through their chases - and their issues - shall be guided.Johnny and his gang of misfits are exiled to earth as punishment for an endless string of petty crimes. The collective foibles of earth, unveiled so cleverly in montage in the film's opening scene, serve as a type of comic depth charge that forces us to view these aliens in light of our own earthly imperfections. Deftly, we the audience, become our own thematic setting for the film.Johnny's ingénue is the intergalactic temptress Bliss, whose predicament between a bad boy and a good boy initiates an examination of the issues that plague both. What Bliss learns, and how she resolves the issues between the two, forms the charm and lessons of Johnny X. And learning about ourselves through exiles from another planet is metaphorically OK, since all young people come from another planet anyways. Bliss is brought to life by De Anna Joy Brooks in a screen stopping performance. Firm on her heels as she sings and dances through the films many attractive original songs, Bliss is the centralizing force of a pack of Ghastly Girls who know how to tantalize male eyes, and paralyze male reason, with the mere hint of a tightly clothed body part. In "These Lips That Never Lie," one of the film's strongest of many memorable musical numbers, she wraps her arms – and legs – around the unsuspecting, wide-eyed Chip, played with boyish, naïve charm by Les Williams. Chip, domestic to a fault, becomes our quintessential good boy – noble, heroic, but too programmed by society's dogma to ever come to understand the world on his own terms. Bliss, trained through the school of hard knocks, senses Chip's naiveté, and as she masterfully manipulates the unsuspecting Chip, Brooks unfurls all the lusty magic of a golden age screen siren.Each of the Ghastly Ones is ushered into the world of goodness through pairings with other characters. Ironically, Johnny's guide appears in the form of a crazy, aging rock star and universal bad boy, the gargoylish Mickey O'Flynn. In one of the best of many strong performances, Creed Bratton walks us through the emotional travails of the soul bearing, ailing star, who must desperately maintain his bad boy image while making peace with the world through subtle goodness towards the younger generation. Bratton masterfully balances wicked machismo with subtle hints of compassion, as if invoking the presence of a secretly gentle satyr.Strong supporting performances abound. Kate Maberly carries the film's parallel romantic pursuit of good after ghastly with wide-eyed gawkiness. She wears polyester florals, struggles on her heels, and even coaxes the sympathies of the uber-jaded Mickey O'Flynn. And a talk show scene with veteran Paul Williams and newcomer Caroline Macey is so skillfully dripping with satire, that the unexpected and sensational appearance of the fleeing, quirky O'Flynn seems ideally arranged. The scene surges with the energy of a script filled with many skillful dramatic bridges and brilliantly conceived one-liners.Paul Bunnell's "Ghastly Love of Johnny X" triumphs with a multi-genre, universal exploration of youth, rebellion and how we choose everything from our lovers to our planets. It shows us that while girls sometimes prefer bad boys over good boys, that bad boys must still redeem their goodness in order to be worthy of their love. Rebellion must be subtle to be cool. Only then can earth become the fun planet of choice. Johnny X delivers all of this with a tremendous sense of style – an interplanetary tour de force. As for Bunnell, the inspired orchestrator of our musical, comical cosmos - exciting new directors don't come along every day, but when one does, it's refreshing to know that we can recognize him through a reminder of what once made the movies great in the first place.