Dead Boyz Can’t Fly (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Howard Winters (Cecil Howard)Release Date(s)
1992 (February 24, 2026)Studio(s)
Command Cinema Corp/Stonecastle Films (Vinegar Syndrome Archive)- Film/Program Grade: C-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: A
Review
Dead Boyz Can’t Fly, the first and only “legit” film from adult film master filmmaker Cecil Howard (real name: Howard Winters), is a throw-every-exploitation-convention-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks masterpiece of what-the-hell-did-I-just-watch? The man who gave us classy theatrical porn films Firestorm, Babylon Pink and Farewell Scarlet developed the spec script he picked up in the 70s for years before he finally decided to shoot it over the course of a week in July 1988. Once shot, he took his time in post releasing it in 1992 where it didn’t make much of a splash, even on VHS and remained somewhat unknown until this release. Does it deserve attention? I think so, yes. It’s certainly an interesting bit of trope-based filmmaking borrowing from Taxi Driver, The Warriors, and A Clockwork Orange. But it’s not as fun and it should or could have been. In fact, it’s a bit mean spirited and nihilistic, even with the, I’m sure, tacked on ending.
Dead Boyz Can’t Fly centers around a New York office building where a gang of punks: Buzz, Goose and JoJo are raiding the offices for cash and drugs. We see backstories for two of the three—Goose is a crossdressing psychopath who has mommy issues, Buzz tried to get a job as an artist at a job recruiter in the building but ends up humiliated by the agent and a girl there for a secretarial job. He follows the girl home that night and murders her in an elevator and plans to kill the agent in the raid he set up, telling tale of the riches and drugs that are in the building to entice Goose and JoJo to join him. JoJo, we hear nothing about, and he looks like a background extra from The Warriors so he’s just there because three is a magic number. While the raid is going on, two gung-ho cops are investigating the murder of the girl in the elevator Buzz killed and they are learning things that will bring them to the office building in the thrilling climax. Also running around the building as Buzz, Goose and JoJo go office to office pillaging is the building’s janitor, John, a Vietnam vet with aspirations of becoming a novelist and a stripper girlfriend (which is worth pointing out because we get to see a well shot routine before the raid starts). The film isn’t cohesive, and so none of these characters come together properly in a way that could have made this Die Hard before Die Hard. It’s mostly an excuse for scenes of “the ultraviolence” with some well shot nudity thrown in. It’s a good old-fashioned exploitation film. A failure, but an interesting one.
Video is presented at 1.85:1 and is newly scanned and restored in 4K from its original 35mm camera negative and it really looks great. As a comparison, the trailer on board keeps that grainy, mid-80s film look that one would expect the film to look like when they pop it in, so it’s a really nice surprise to see such an underseen film look this good. Those folks at Vinegar Syndrome do good work. Sound is a balanced 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio track with English SDH subtitles, and the metal songs used in the soundtrack sound great.
The extras on this Region Free disc include a good selection of new interviews. The first is with actor Brad Friedman (“Goose”) titled On the Fly where he reminisces about his days of being a young working actor, primarily in the theater, taking this role and not remembering much about it aside from it being a fun experience. The next is an interview with the original screenwriter Straw Weisman titled Fear City. Weisman is the proverbial guy that was always going to end up doing something in film, chasing his dream as a film booker in New York, eventually writing movies for the distributor he was working for and how he came to write this film with Bert Goodman and how it was rewritten by Anne Wolf and what he thinks about that after watching the film recently. Babylon Red is an interview with Bradley Winters, who is Howard’s son and served a few roles on the film, including EP. This is one of the more interesting and informative interviews as Bradley remembers pretty much everything and has plenty of stories about his dad’s business and filmmaking career. Finally, there is Family Business, an interview with production assistant Scott Buckwald who went on from this to becoming one of Hollywood’s most prolific Property Managers, among other roles in production. This is the most fun of the four interviews, Buckwald is a storyteller and comes off as someone anyone could have a good hang with—which is a quality for someone who’s been on as many sets as he has. This is just a good round of interviews and well worth the dive into. Included is a long stills gallery, the trailer I mentioned above, and it all comes in a limited to 4,000 units in a VHS style bottom-up slipcase with reversible sleeve art and a poster.
- Todd Doogan