John Michael McCarthy

Filmmaker Craig Brewer highlights a number of independent Memphis filmmakers, and shows the full short films Broke on a Saturday, You Better Behave, Blown, Two Hundred Dollars on E-Bay, Clean Up in Booth B, The Morning Ritual and Eso-Phagas.

JMM and his friendly elitist entourage shot super-8 stag footage of starlets and collected music from bands who played with The Sore Losers!

A businessman is led around Tupelo, Mississippi by a '50s tour guide showing him its connection to Elvis Presley.

In Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1962, a poor, young, single mother is impregnated by a womanizing has-been singer. Her mother tries to force her to give the child away but our heroine isn't sure. As she tries to solve her problems she receives assistance from unlikely quarters: a lesbian gang and the feminist/nudist/stripper/adult film star they idolize.

In the near future laws against smoking have increased to the point where you must live in a certain part of town called the Smoking Section if want to smoke cigarettes. Once you have passed the line of demarcation you just know you've crossed the tracks because things get a little grimier, a little more industrial. If you travel there to smoke or to buy, the main place is the Vice Club. Cigarette Girl becomes an angel of death when she stops smoking and starts killing on the third day to alleviate her acute psychological withdrawal manifested primarily by the ghost of a cowboy who is always on her back to keep smoking. Cigarette Girl would rather kill than smoke.

An amazing and timeless collection of pretty peelers brought to the masses by super 8 seamstress Victoria Renard and Memphis Movie Messiah JMM [Superstarlet A.D.]. Set against a backdrop of sock dropping rock and roll and beautifully bizarre screen-warped colorization. Featuring the timeless toasts of the modern burlesque scene such as Miss Exotic Wood 2002 KITTEN DeVILLE [Auto Focus], URSULINA [Lucha Va Voom], THE FISHNET FLOOZYS, Miss Exotic Wood 2004 DIRTY MARTINI, MIMI LeMEAUX, CANDY WHIPLASH, THE DEVILETTES, THE SOPHISTIKITTENS, and MORE! See Starlets "burlesque" to garage rocknroll recorded in the most primitive conditions!

Documentary about the Memphis Academy of Art, culled from the archives of sculptor John McIntire's super 8 films from 1972.

An enchanted tale of an artist, a critic, and a leather-clad, tree-dwelling gang who fall in love with a French girl, who takes them on an odyssey of Love, Sex and Dreams.

While delivering an apocalyptic message to his sect, the unearthly Black Jesus orders his leather-clad, biker converts to destroy the pagan mistress Damselvis before she can raise her father, the fabled rock and roll deity Helvis, from the dead. When a sheltered, country schoolgirl named Isla M. (Sherry Lynn Garris) is nearly butchered by Black Jesus’ murderous disciple Candy (Ghetty Chasun), she is miraculously reborn as the fringe-adorned, Harley riding Damselvis; who promptly embarks on a pilgrimage to Memphis, spreading the gospel along the way by disseminating Helvis records to a burgeoning and ardent congregation of fans. Once Helvis is resurrected from his pyramid tomb, he must confront the monstrous Woofman in a final battle to the death to determine the religious rites for the new millennia!

A documentary about the razing of Memphis history.

The world has ended. All that is left behind are individual beauty cults, groups of girls seeking safety and identity in numbers. Basing their bond on hair color and giving themselves strangely evocative gang names, the blond Phayrays (King Kong), the brunette Satanas (Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!), and the wicked, redheaded Tempests (as in Storm, the stripper) are constantly battling the brutish cavemen roaming the afterworld ruins and looking for potential dye job converts. Only one group tries to incorporate all follicle factions. They are the Superstarlets.

Set in present day Northeastern Mississippi and Memphis, Blackie returns to Earth 42 years after his first visit to complete a mission: Given a second chance by The Elder of the Lo-Fi Frequency, he is to finish his original mission of killing 12 victims. He hooks up with his old friend Mike then eventually meets Kerine and Goliatha. Trouble begins...

Based very loosely on a brief account in Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography Careless Love, the film is a fantasia about the night the Fab Four and the King spent together in 1965.