My Boys Are Good Boys

Ida Lupino and Ralph Meeker together again after being terrorized by giant rats in food of the gods.anyway Ralph meeker plays an armored car driver,his son is in a reformatory being watched over by a guard with a big heart(David Doyle)yeah bosley on TVs Charlie's angels.well the plot starts to unfold when three of the kids plan to rob the armored car led by Ralph Meekers son(Sean Thomas Roche)and a girl(Kerry Lynn)who is being tutored by Ralph meekers characters wife.there's some good car chases and crashes,plot twists and some pg rated mayhem,ill have to say its not a bad little b movie,also in the movie is the great Lloyd Nolan who i remember from the Julia TV show with Dianne Carroll. i saw this one on the 50 action classics DVD set from mill creek,formally tree line films.i guess Ralph Meeker and Ida Lupino needed a break from the food of the gods(77)i especially like David Doyle's performance as the guard.6 out of 10

This film is available on Mill Creek Entertainment's Action Classics 100 Movie Pack. After watching Trained to Kill: USA (the real reason I bought the box set) I switched to the next movie My Boys Are Good Boys, at first I assumed it was about rebellious youths and the whole movie would take place in the reformatory where they are held, but the story seemed to have more surprising twists and turns then an episode of 24. A somewhat easy escape leads to the youths robbing an armored truck. This is one of the best stories I have seen in a long time. What was also surprising was the performances. More notably David Doyle who played Harry Klinger the reformatory guard giving his my boys are good boys speech, Kerry Lynn as Priscilla, and the always hungry Chunky played by Robert Cokjlat. This film is a classic and a joy to discover.

I had never heard of it before watching this seventies crime movie. A crime flick that looks like a fifties or late forties film, speaking of juvenile delinquency. Not the seventies genre, for sure. The story is very surprising, where a bunch of very young hoodlums pull a daring and clever armored truck heist, behaving like professionals. Very surprising. I did not expect so much. And seeing old movie actors like Oda Lupino and Lloyd Nolan is pretty weird and funny too. Yes, a very good little film which grabs you, despite the fact that you have only a few spectacular and exciting elements. But don't misunderstand me, that's not a masterpiece, just a smart little grade B picture. Music score all along the film is pretty entertaining too.

I would have rated this film with 1 star, but it got an additional 1 for Lloyd Nolan's brave performance as a security officer and an extra 1/2 for Ida Lupino as a shrewish wife, and an extra 1/2 for Ralph Meeker's role as a truculent drunk bad dad.

But the MUSIC! Oh my God. The music. The horrible synthesizer music bubbling away like little rodential heartbeats as we are supposed to feel fear, tension, drama, interest, or some other emotion which we cannot feel because the music is popping like popcorn farts! Oh, Lord have mercy. If you are the kind of person who can't take bad music, please, be cautious -- the sound track may damage your internal organs.

Also this film is a wasteland of bad late 1970s architecture, as it was filmed right before Post-Modern architecture saved us all from architectural cultural suicide. Just keep reciting your mantra, "Later on there would be good architecture. This was not the end of the world." Oh, and there's this insane fainting-gas stuff. The teens buy it at the local convenience store, no doubt. Another reviewer suggested the idea came from "Batman." I concur.

And i will offer a sparkly reward to anyone who can tell me the name of the book that Ida Lupino is reading on her bed when Ralph Meeker comes home after a long day in the armoured car industry. My TV was too small to zero in on it, but i have the feeling that if i could have read that title, i would have been rewarded by some sort of fabulous in-joke. Or maybe not.

Lloyd Nolan is okay. Ida Lupino is okay. Ralph Meeker is okay. The rest of this movie is insanely useless except to people who want to watch cars crash into one another over and over and over and over again.

This movie stinks harder than all the dumplings left over by a thousand dogs, a thousand cats, a thousand bulls and maybe one or two elephants. I see nothing fantastic about this movie other than a bunch of ugly kids trying to pull off an Ocean's Eleven with a bunch of even uglier older men and women. Sean, or whatever the heck his name is, is by far the worst interpretation of a rebellious kid - you'll find better acting from the kid from 'Austin Powers' one, two, and three. This was obviously a film that was supposed to be the next greatest thing since Muhammed Ali took to the ring and kicked everyone's butt, but I'm gonna be perfectly frank, Frank... it's not. It doesn't even rank as high as me walking on top of a Dance Dance Revolution machine trying to impress all of the employees at Hooters, man. It's that bad. If you've got your copy, I suggest you take it and dump it in the ground and bury it for all it's worth. It'll eat your eyes and burn your tongue straight off, finding all of your next of kin and ripping them apart without your knowledge.

The music sounds more like a bunch of farts going off at once; 'musical farts', as I like to call it. Perhaps that is the only redeeming quality I have to give about this movie - and it shows that you too can be an amazing cult following by doing just that. Everyone should remember that the next time they get their couple of dollars and a video camera, and decide to make this movie. Will there be a sequel to this? Let's hope so, boy howdy! Maybe there, the musical farts return, with the opening theme song redux and maybe a Pachelbel's Canon solo. I bet that grossly obese kid will have a field day with it.

What's up with that fat tub of lard though, anyway? Did he even get a second's worth of screen time for his effort? I don't know what's scary, the weird-looking neegroe humping the doctor and the Charlie's Angels guy during the beginning or the two fat chest boobs wobbling each time the fat guy hustled from scene to scene. I bet he's dead now. He probably deserved it.

Like I said, this movie sucks. You'll have a field day with 'Bawop, Bawop, Bawoowowowowowooooop' tune when one of the hillbillies is drinking his brandy in the car while snooping on a potential sex victim, but that's as far as it goes. Other than that, this movie sucks. You're stupid if you rated it any higher.