Head Canon: Redneck Miller (1976)

Welcome to Head Canon - a collection of weird and wonderful films that live rent-free in my brain. Nobody's saying these are the best movies ever made, but every week, I'll deliver some thoughts on a new title that, for one reason or another, has set up shop in my consciousness for the foreseeable future.

We're staying in 1976 this week, only instead of the beach, we're headed Down South to visit North Carolina's horniest, meanest DJ, Redneck Miller...

"Baby, you can take a lot of loving, but I can only get killed once."

DJ Miller (Geoffrey Land) is a proverbial man of simple pleasures. He’s got his souped-up truck. Plus, a custom chopper in said pickup’s bed. Most days, he spins his records at the local radio station, sending coded messages to all those lovely (and not so lovely) ladies out in lonely double-wides, who’re just looking for passion in all the wrong places. Occasionally, he’ll find himself in bed with a local big-titty floozy (Angel Sande) before going home to a good girl, Jenny (Linda Hammond), who can’t help herself when it comes to DJ’s Dixie charm.

Yep. All in all, life’s pretty solid for this wax-spinning rascal. DJ's got the run of his small town, and has even drawn the jealous ire of the pool-shooting shit-kickers down at the local watering hole. Yet even when those dip-spitting thugs get a little too lippy, Miller can (mostly) hold his own when it comes to throwing blows with the biggest thugs. Some might say this redneck's a good ol' boy with a mean streak as wide as the Catawba.

Unfortunately for DJ, shit’s going to get a lot more complicated, thanks to local grass peddler, Supermack (Sydney Rubin), who thinks Miller's ripped off his latest shipment of Colombian Gold. Turns out, someone stole our hero’s bike while he was napping, and used it to haul a sack of green away from the local airstrip, shaking Supermack’s two flunky henchmen in the process.

Complicating matters further, DJ happens to stumble upon Supermack’s lady, Pearl (the incredibly foxy Paulette Gibson), and lays more pipe on her than one of the Mario Bros. Now, Miller’s got forty-eight hours to find out who stole the local pimp daddy’s drugs, or he’s gonna end up in a ditch somewhere no one will ever find him. What’s a humble, Schlitz-swilling disc jockey to do?

Produced for roughly a truckload of PBR tallboys, Redneck Miller ('76) is a true drive-in oddity, tough to see for decades outside of one-off rep screenings of a 35mm print from some private archivist’s personal collection. Shot in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, and then projected on double and triple features on the Southern exploitation circuit, DJ Miller’s sex-crazed existence was the brainchild of rednecksploitation scribe Joseph Alvarez, who’d previously banged out the similarly sweaty Hot Summer in Barefoot County ('74) and Trucker’s Women ('75). In short, if a horny down-home fella was looking for some nookie, Alvarez put the words in their mouth to score.

Let’s back up a second. Next to Blaxploitation - which Redneck Miller deftly blends into its central narrative (to a probable financial disadvantage) - rednecksploitation is possibly the purest form of exploitation cinema, as it’s born from the basic desire to see one’s own image projected up on the screen, and then to crassly sell that image back to the very folks who hold that need near and dear to their hearts. There’s a reason an entire cottage industry was built not just in North Carolina, but across the Southern United States, churning out numerous (and sometimes unwatchable...at least sober) pictures that stink like fried chicken grease and stubby bottles of Banquet.

Take Earl Owensby, for example. Before he was locked into a legal battle with James Cameron over an abandoned nuclear power plant - a story for another HC entry entirely - Owensby built himself a homegrown empire. Inspired by Joe Don Baker’s Walking Tall (’73), Owensby produced and starred in his first of sixteen features, Challenge (’74), where he plays a United States Senator who goes on a rampage against La Cosa Nostra after the mob murders his whole family. Is it good? Not really. Instead, Challenge is a phenomenal product of the sort of up-from-yer-bootstraps DIY ambition that’d give life to so many movies like Redneck Miller.

The formation of the Preacherman Corporation - whose founders, Ulmer S. Eaddy and W. Henry Smith (the latter of which does everything from producing to writing the music for Miller), were simultaneously invested in the drive-in exhibition game - isn’t too far off from Owensby’s story. Named for Albert T. Viola’s silly Confederate State con man sex comedy, Preacherman (’71), it was yet another homegrown operation that seemed to vertically integrate by producing the very moonshine and fisticuff entertainments its target demographic desired before projecting them on drive-in screens that they owned. Populated mostly by local actors and cobbled together by crews of untested craftsmen, there’s a quite literal “community theater” element to all of these productions that made them even more attractive to local ticket buyers, further cementing the “for us, by us” vibe that these now mostly forgotten companies were going for.

In fairness, the twelve of us who care about these sorts of things probably wouldn't still be talking about movies like Redneck Miller - not to mention the majority of rednecksploitation - if it weren’t for Burt Reynolds. Like with all exploitation booms, there has to be a proven (usually studio-distributed) product to rip off wholesale, and Reynolds was arguably responsible for both the first and second waves of Southern fried cinematic shenanigans, thanks to his pair of Gator McClusky pictures and, to an even greater degree, Smokey and the Bandit (’77).

Reynolds’ output with longtime stunt double/roommate/smash and crash car movie giant, Hal Needham, is the stuff of legend, similarly born from a drive to deliver something the good ol’ boys this former Florida State football star and son of a sharecropper grew up with could hoot and holler along to at their own local the-a-ters. The only difference was that, unlike Preacherman and Redneck Miller, these movies broke containment and crossed over into the mainstream, with Smokey leading to an entire boom of big rig entertainment (including Sam Peckinpah's foray into the CB lifestyle, Convoy ['77]), bringing loveable lugs like Jerry Reed to the doorstep of suburban America.

God bless Geoffrey Land. Unlike the majority of his co-stars, Land had a pretty steady career (of sorts), mostly hanging out on the infamous Spahn Ranch as an Al Adamson stock player. From 1971 through 1983, Land appeared in nine Adamson productions, mostly in supporting parts, while occasionally getting a nice meaty role in one of the notorious schlock director's messes (he's the doctor boyfriend of the titular possessed caretaker in Nurse Sherri ['77]). Land has a plainspoken charisma that carries the majority of the movie, confounding Supermack's minions with his mix of deadpan smarm and charm, requesting that, upon the thugs taking both his woman and wheels until they receive reparations for the crime they believe he committed, he receive both back "un-mo-lested". Nobody's arguing that the guy should've had some long-running marquee career. Yet his blunt naturalism fits the character perfectly, and actually has you rooting for a guy who is, at the end of the day, mostly an asshole.

Though Redneck Miller is a filmic anthropological wonder in hindsight, it's also tough not to wonder if the hybrid of Blaxploitation with hick cinema was a slight turn-off on the Southern drive-in circuit. Supermack and his goons are cartoonishly entertaining foils for DJ, and over half the movie's entertainment comes from Miller playing the Bugs Bunny to Mack's increasingly exasperated Elmer Fudd. Still, the boys are no Buford T. Justice. Thankfully, cinematographer Austin McKinney (The Love Butcher ['75]) captures all the wood paneled drug dens and tobacco stained bartops with the eye of a guy who actually existed in these spaces after capturing the dirty racetracks in Jack Hill's Pit Stop ('69), and then moving on to do SFX photography for both John Carpenter (Escape From New York ['81]) and James Cameron (The Terminator ['84]). Not a bad bit of work for a camera kid from Carolina.

Were it not for the modern repertory screening scene, movies like Redneck Miller would arguably be lost to time. Surprising no one at all, Quentin Tarantino began circulating a rare 35mm print at a memorial for the OG Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, Texas, in May of 2007. This writer originally saw DJ Miller do his thing on the same print in 2011, courtesy of Exhumed Films’ annual Ex-Fest, where the movie lived in infamy for anyone who was in attendance, eagerly awaiting any home video release in the subsequent years so that they could prove that the movie exists at all to their friends.

Because what good is an authentic representation of a culture if it vanishes along with its contemporary audience? While many could (and will) argue that the backwards worldviews and shoddy production values render Redneck Miller a value-free proposition in 2025, it's truly a snapshot into a particular place, time, and people, free from the confines of studio notes or interference. In short, it's an un-mo-lested peek into the psyche of a rural America that usually doesn't get to see itself onscreen, with a central hero who you actually want to hang out with, even if he does try to steal your girl by the final reel.

Redneck Miller is now available on Blu-ray from Film Masters.