Brothers of the Head

UK 2005 93min
Dir: Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe
Featuring: Luke Treadaway, Harry Treadaway, Ken Russell, Howard Attfield, Jonathan Pryce

This raw mock-rock-doc is an inspired, unsettling and intriguing assault on political correctness, celebrity and the personal implications of our throwaway culture.

Tom and Barry Howe are twins born joined at the stomach. To protect them from 50’s small town ignorance and ridicule, their father isolates the family in rural England. However, when the boys develop into stunning-looking teens, Zak Bedderwick, a morally-dubious music promoter, finds them and convinces their father to part with them. He locks them up with minders in a run-down mansion and grooms them into becoming the next big thing – a boy band with a difference - Bang Bang. Leaving behind their naiveté, Tom and Barry take to their task with gusto, and soon take the band’s music and performance to a completely different level of Brit-grunge rock.

This fascinating film, tinged with moody homoeroticism, moves freely between reminiscent interviews, archive docu footage and clips from Ken Russel’s Two-Way Romeo. If you ever wondered what Oasis brother’s Liam and Noel Gallagher would have been like if they had been performing in the 70s and were physically inseparable, this fabulously lurid, daring expose of exploitation comes as close as you are ever going to get.

Based on the 1997 novel by renowned sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss, famed for his surreal imagery and liberal attitude towards sex.

JHB     Fri 2 / 11pm          Mon 5 / 9.15pm         Fri 9 / 11pm
CT    Sat 10 / 10.30pm     Wed 14 / 9pm             Sat 17 / 10.30pm