Dee Dee Ramone Movies

Filmmaker Michael Gramaglia's years-in-the-making biography of the legendary punk band the Ramones entitled End of the Century traces nearly all the various and sundry peaks and valleys which the seminal rockers experienced over the course of its 20-plus year career before disbanding in 1995. Beginning with the band's first concert performances in the mid-'70s, Gramaglia explores the eccentric and highly volatile band members -- in all the various line-ups that were presented over the years -- as the Ramones slowly gained fame for their high energy and high-tempo style of music that would later influence generations of punk rockers around the world. Mixing archival interviews with new interviews of the various surviving bandmembers, as well as interviews with a number of the Ramones' contemporaries, End of the Century encapsulates the East Coast underground music atmosphere of the 1970s and '80s that the band inadvertently shocked into existence. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide

G.G. Allin was a musician and performance artist who was the human embodiment of everything dangerous, threatening, and unwholesome about punk rock, with absolutely none of its redeeming qualities. Allin's music was a fuzzy, incoherent blare that made the Ramones sound baroque by comparison, featuring lyrics that openly celebrated degradation, rape, and murder, and his performances (which rarely lasted more than ten or 15 minutes) usually found him far gone on drugs and alcohol, naked and rolling about in his own feces when not attempting to physically attack the audience. In short, Allin was not a musician so much as a one-man freak show, and he won a small but loyal audience as perhaps the most singularly perverse sociological phenomenon of his day before dying of a drug overdose on July 28, 1993 (failing to make good on his pledge to take his own life on stage). Filmmaker Todd Phillips spent several weeks in 1993 following Allin as he and his band the Murder Junkies (which briefly featured Dee Dee Ramone on guitar) attempted to tour, and Hated: G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies is the result. The film features footage of several chaotic live performances, interviews with Allin and his bandmates, clips from television appearances (including an interview with Geraldo Rivera in which Allin tells the reporter, "My flesh, blood and body fluids are a communion to the people -- whether they like it or not"), Allin having some typically repugnant "fun" at a party, and a phone call from G.G. after he ran afoul of the law (a frequent occurrence in his short life). The home video release of Hated also features bonus footage of Allin's funeral and his final "concert." Director Phillips later went on to cover the opposite end of the rock spectrum with Bittersweet Motel, his feature on the improvisational "jam band" Phish. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Rock 'n' Roll High School is a prime example of a 1970s movie phenomenon: a cult film that was deliberately designed to be a cult film. High-schooler Riff Randell's (P.J. Soles) efforts to meet the Ramones are continually thwarted by rock & roll-hating principal Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov). Ms. Togar is the zealous sort who conducts experiments on laboratory rats to prove the adverse effect of rock music on innocent teenagers. Riff knows that she'll have to be twice as clever and devious as Togar to get her daily supply of Ramones -- and thereby hangs our tale. A secondary plot involves the efforts of pimply student Eaglebauer (Clint Howard) to arrange a date with the very particular Riff. A deliciously anarchistic climax caps this never-a-dull-moment spoof of 1950s rock & roll musicals. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide