In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, while I was attending Ohio State, my friends and I were in the local band scene. Columbus was a pretty rockin’ town at the time, with small shows of every stripe occurring daily. Venues like Bernie’s, Andyman’s Treehouse, and Little Brother’s provided a steady stream of young and hungry bands chasing rock n’ roll dreams. Though I only saw them two or three times, one group stood above the rest.
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream blew me away when I first saw them in ’02 or ’03 at Columbus’ huge yearly outdoor music festival, Comfest. Before the show began, my buddies and I had purchased some chocolate party favors from a fun guy wandering the park where the festival takes place. After passing around a handle of vodka we’d snuck onto the grounds, we thought we were prepared for whatever might happen that evening.
We were wrong.
My buddy, who had told me that GMPD was a must-see live act, had said they put on a crazy show and he wasn’t lying. Stepbrothers Gil Mantera (aka Glen Dietz, synthesizer/background vocals) and Ultimate Donny (aka Richie Bernacki, guitar/lead vocals) berated the crowd, fought each other, crushed a massive number of beers, and melted our faces off with bizarrely ironic synth-pop songs with earnest but nonsensical lyrics. They did so all while dressed in nothing but banana hammocks, frilly vests, and ski goggles, too. The crowd lapped it up like a hippie’s dog with a bowl of cheap beer. I instantly became a fan.
By 2006 or so, I quit the party life for various reasons. I wasn’t living on campus anymore and the realities of being an adult had begun to set in. Years would go by before I discovered that GMPD had continued to have relatively greater success. In a fit of nostalgia, I had googled them and found out they had an actual album that could be purchased. I instantly nabbed Bloodsongs off of eBay. My commute to work was now colored by tracks like “Elmo’s Wish” and “Chalklit Pyhe II.”
Recently, I went looking for any news I could find about the band. Why did they break up? What were they doing now? Who the fuck were these fearless weirdos in real life? That’s when I came across Aaron Hagele and Tim Slowikowski’s documentary on the rise and fall of GMPD entitled Party Dream. As I had done with the CD a few years prior, I enthusiastically tapped the add to cart button on Amazon.
So, how’s the movie? Hagele and Slowikowski are not filmmakers by trade, but they nevertheless spent seven years on this project. Utilizing tons of vintage footage that ranges from the band’s modest beginnings in 1999 to their implosion in 2010, we are given a taste of what their bugnuts live performances were like in all their outrageous and often hilarious glory. We get interviews with various folks who knew them in their heyday, the most notable of which is Patrick Carney of the Black Keys. We also got to catch up with Richie in 2015, now back in the band’s hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. At that point, he and Glen, who declined to participate in the doc, had not spoken in five years.
Bouncing back and forth between the raucous clips of GMPD’s shows and Richie’s discussions of his struggles since the band’s death on the doorstep of fame gives some unexpected and bittersweet heft to the piece. You can tell he’s deeply wounded by the situation even though he puts on a brave face. Ultimate Donny may have been larger than life, but Richie is just a man subject to the pitfalls of life like the rest of us.
Party Dream had a budget of just twenty-five grand. Despite this and the co-directors inexperience, the film is mostly polished and well-put together. It’s not altogether linear, but we can follow along easily enough and the pacing never lags. Obviously, all the fantastic music helps with this, but Hagele and Slowikowski show that they understand rhythm and storytelling. The film looks better than you’d think with such a meager budget, too. All in all, I was more than satisfied with the technical merits.
Aaron Hagele and Tim Slowikowski’s 2022 documentary Party Dream is a gift to fans of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream. Beyond that, it also does an outstanding job of illustrating the rise and fall of a band that almost made it to the big time. Though most of the film looks back from the vantage of 2015, I’m glad that there’s a bit of a coda from more recent days in the closing moments of the 75-minute runtime that provides a bit more closure. The DVD contains no special features, but the A/V specs are about as good as you could hope for, given the format. Even if I’d never heard of the band before, I’d still say this is a lovely little film. Highly recommended for fans of booking a CD release party when you haven’t cut an album, dancing on stage in a thong and cowboy boots, and improvising wacky lyrics under pressure.
Michael Cavender