Horns up, woprophiles! Tonight in our cinematic cauldron, broom-stirred to perfection, we've got some Kiwi splatter comedy a la vintage Peter Jackson flavored with the brutally heavy axe riffs of the heavy metal genre. The end result is 2015's Deathgasm, the debut film for director Jason Lei Howden, and one mired in controversy when Walmart refused to carry it under it's original title, renaming it "Heavy Metal Apocalypse" instead, a title more palpable to grossly obese blonde bible-thumping strumpets whirring around the frozen dessert section, perhaps. I like the original a lot more, how about you? It's more brutal in capital letters, seeing how lower case are clearly for pussies. Let's check it out, oh and death to false metal...
"How do I say 'I'm enjoying our ice cream date' in proto-Nordic?"
Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a teenage metalhead upon whom a rotten series of events does turn, when his father dies and his mother books a padded room at the squirrel farm, forcing him to move in with his ultra-Christian uncle, Albert and his family, which includes cousin David (who's a bullying dickhead jock/preppie/wigger), at their home in Greypoint. The young rocker doesn't fit in at school either, only connecting with a pair of D&D-crazed misfit dorks in Dion and Giles(Sam Berkley, Daniel Cresswell, respectively) . To further compound matters, the object of his teenage affection, a blonde dimepiece named Medina (Kimberley Crossman) who's neither funky nor cold, is romantically linked to David the dick. While temporarily escaping the madness of his life at a local record store that stocks all the best metal records, he meets fellow metal proponent Zakk (James Blake), and a brothers-in-metal blood oath is soon struck between the boys. The headbangers soon recruit the two dice-rolling dweebs as members of their brutal new band, DEATHGASM, because, you know, lower case letters are for pussies! Cue hilarious DIY black metal video shot in the forest nearby, for good effect.
The Great Kat should probably think about moving over at this point.
Brodie and Medina eventually go out for ice cream (awwwwww), but he proves too shy to plant one on her in the end. When the two boys break into the seemingly abandoned home of metal legend Rikki Daggers, he hands them an album and sends them packing before a suit-clad assassin breaks in and slashes the singer's throat. Besides finding a Rick Astley (!) lp in the record sleeve, there's also the sheet music for "The Black Hymn", a devastating piece of music that can summon the king of demons, one Aeloth. Meanwhile, the snazzy hitman reports back to his employer, who becomes furious that the Hymn has yet eluded him, and orders some Satanic-looking henchmen to behead the killer, while avoiding making a bloody mess on his carpet, is an implied point. While Davey the Dick lays the sneakers in on his metalhead cousin for chatting up his girl, Zakk purposely withholds messages and notes from her to him, and muscles in on his friend's new territory with the help of alcohol and Cosby pills. Alright, no Cosby pills. Fed up, Brodie gets his bandmates to play the entire Black Hymn, and as they say, all Hell breaks loose from this point.
Congratulations, you've moved onto the semifinal round of Norway's Got Brutality!
Packed with goopy gore and creature effects, hilariously sophomoric dialog peppered with sex toys and dick jokes, inventively animated transitional editing, and entertaining performances from it's young cast, Deathgasm harkens genre fans like myself to the first time I threw Bad Taste (1988) into a vcr lifetimes ago, and I've come away from the experience with a lot of the same feelings of positivity I had back then. I'm clearly not alone on this one either, as the movie has been nominated for nearly twenty awards in various film festivals, including but not limited to, Best Kill (Death by sex toy). I think that says it all, really. A sequel may or may not be in the works. On the scale, Deathgasm earns three solid Wops. Check it out, you'll be glad you did.
Get your lightning tits out for the dark lord and master, baby.
No comments:
Post a Comment