My Teen Brain Was Not Ready For Dead Presidents (1995)

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a guest post! Joey Brown is both one of my oldest friends and one of the very first guest writers we’ve showcased here in this newsletter. (You may remember his excellent piece about Hitchcock’s use of fire sprinkler systems in Saboteur, a thing that only he could’ve written.) He’s making a triumphant return this week with a lovely anecdote about a trip to the video store in the 90s that opened his eyes a bit wider than he’d bargained for. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Take it away, Joey!

There was a time when my parents would leave me at the house by myself during the summer months. I was too young to drive, but I was too old for a babysitter.

They’d give me a ton of chores to do. Sometimes I would go to my grandparents’ house and help with their chores too, like mowing the lawn or helping my grandfather load rocking chairs onto his truck to sell.¹ Sometimes I would finish my chores and hang out with my buddy Kyle. We usually rode our bikes through cow pastures and built treehouses in the woods.

But sometimes, when all the chores were done and it was simply too hot to hang out in the woods with Kyle, I would ride my bike a mile down a country road and rent a movie.

You probably already guessed there wasn’t much to the place where I grew up. In this mostly white, rural community, the only public places were several churches, two gas stations, a school, and a video store. I found out at a very early age that this video store would rent anything to me, so I used this opportunity to take home things I wasn’t supposed to watch.² You know. R-rated movies.

My world was opened to all kinds of stuff. My teen brain would normally gravitate towards horror (Friday the 13th, Scream) or raunchy comedies (BASEketball, Joe’s Apartment). One particular day, I was looking around at all the VHS covers on the shelf. Some had tapes behind them, some did not.³ And I came across Dead Presidents. I knew nothing about it, but I’m pretty sure I rented it because it was rated R and the cover looked cool. Sometimes that’s all it took.

I got home and popped it in the VCR. Boy was I not ready for what this film threw at me.

It’s a genre mash-up of a drama—part romance, part war movie, part heist film, all set in the late 60s/early 70s. At its heart, it’s about the struggle Black Americans faced coming home from a war that many believed we weren’t supposed to be in. The things they saw and the things they had to do to survive were unimaginable. After going through all that—and then coming home to nightmares, no money, no job, and a child in one character’s case—one could see how daily frustrations could lead some to take drastic measures.

Now, I can’t speak for anybody involved in things like that. I’m a white dude that’s never been to war. The closest thing I can relate to in this movie is hearing my grandfather talk about World War II and how he had a tough time finding work when he got back.

I would say of all the movies I rented during that time, this is the one that opened my eyes the most. It felt way more real than what I was looking for. And after rewatching it as an adult, I’m ready to confess to a few crimes myself.

There’s a lot to love about Dead Presidents. The cast is stacked, and every actor absolutely kills it in every scene. You’ve got Keith David, Chris Tucker, Larenz Tate, and Bokeem Woodbine all giving outstanding performances alongside notable smaller roles from Terrance Howard and Rose Jackson. Martin Sheen plays a judge in one scene.

The music is excellent too. You’ve got Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, and Aretha Franklin all together, and every song is perfectly timed and placed. Along with directing and producing, the Hughes Brothers executive produced the soundtrack, and you can tell. It’s low-key one of the better soundtracks out there.

The effects crew went all out as well to depict the terrors of war. Dead Presidents is surprisingly gory. Like extreme horror movie levels of gore. My 15-year old brain wasn’t ready for that either. I’m pretty sure I covered my eyes a few times.

Now that my teen brain is an adult brain, my thoughts on Dead Presidents have been stirring. Sure, there’s plenty of violence, language, and “sexual situations,” but I’m thinking maybe R ratings are there for other reasons sometimes. Maybe an R rating is there to say “Kid, you ain’t got enough life experience to understand this yet.”

My suspicions were confirmed when I went down to Tuscaloosa the other day to help my friend Hawvy hang a TV. I asked him if he had seen Dead Presidents. “Oh yeah, that was the movie Chris Tucker did right after Friday,” he said. “My buddies and me were all excited when it came out and rented it on VHS, but it wasn’t Friday at all. It was too adult for us.”

I confess that I did something I wasn’t supposed to do when I rented Dead Presidents. I suppose the video store did too. But renting this particular film opened my eyes to a world I wasn’t familiar with. And I appreciated that. Movies like Phantoms and Money Talks are great for entertainment reasons, but Dead Presidents is great for educational/human interaction reasons.

I was ready to be entertained that day, but what I got instead was a lesson in government abandonment and the struggles of marginalized communities in our country. Even though I didn’t fully understand what Dead Presidents was trying to say, I think it planted a seed in my brain to pay attention to what’s happening around us. To help when you can. To treat everyone with respect. And instead of taking drastic measures, maybe listen to Curtis Mayfield instead and “keep on pushing.”

Dead Presidents is now streaming on Hoopla, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. My grandfather was a real one. For a while there, he couldn’t find work, so he started a septic tank business because nobody else wanted that job. Eventually somehow he got into fixing up rocking chairs. I bet he enjoyed that more.

2. I know I probably shouldn’t have done that. But also maybe someone at the video store should’ve been like “Son, you’re 15. You can’t rent this movie.” That’s in the past, though, so there’s nothing that can be done about it now.

3. We miss those days, don’t we?