At age 40, I have accepted that I will never be a metalhead. Metal music is like sports, in a sense, in that I think if you don’t get into it at an early age, you’re never going to be into it. Nobody discovers that baseball is great when they’re 35. Baseball fans all loved it when they were 10 years old. Same thing with metal. If you’re halfway through high school and your hair is short and you don’t own a Slayer T-shirt and you’ve never banged your head or thrown out devil horns or gotten deep at all with a song about being raped by demons in the Norwegian forest, it’s (probably) NEVER going to happen. And for me, it never happened. When I was 16-17, I was into old Bob Hope movies and Laurel and Hardy and jazz music from 1932 (ie. the LEAST metal things ever) while the metal boat sailed right past me in the night. I didn’t even notice it.
THAT SAID, I do like the surface details of the Metal Way of Life. I like the tasteless band names, the black T-shirts, the hair, the make-up, the leather, the patches, the logos, the pagan and Satanic symbols, the anger and the alienation. It’s very picturesque. I don’t take part in it in any way (I don’t know Burzum from Ibuprofen), but I like knowing that it’s out there. If I ruled the world, the metalheads would be free to carry on.
And that’s probably why I really like Deathgasm, a mega-likable horror comedy (every bit as likable as Shaun of the Dead, but with way more crass humor), neck-deep in the metal look, lore and leather. It’s a movie from some crazy kids in New Zealand and it tells the touching story of what happens when a garage metal band in a nowhere town find mysterious sheet music in the home of a reclusive scumbag legend, decide to play it during practice and unwittingly release supernatural havoc in their neighborhood (the very music itself is a kind of demonic incantation) that results in all of their neighbors vomiting blood and turning into mad mutated killers.
It’s a film that never announces the year of its setting, but it seems to be sometime in the 90s. Nobody has a cellphone (all important messages are left in handwritten notes). One character prominently totes a Discman. And the special effects lean toward retro, practical, analog prosthetics and gallons of red-dyed corn syrup spraying furiously across every corner of the wide screen. Nobody does that anymore today, so you instantly know that these people really care.
So, I really care right back. This is good, gonzo stuff. Death to false metal.