American Satan

American Satan (2017)

Dir. Ash Avildsen

Written by Ash Avildsen and Matty Beckerman

Starring Andy Biersack, John Bradley, Jesse Sullivan, Booboo Stewart, Malcolm McDowell, with Bill Goldberg, Bill Duke, Mark Boone Junior and Denise Richards whaaaaaaat?

AMERICAN SATAN is a fucking mystery. I never heard anyone, in real life or online, talk about it. Never saw an ad. Never saw a review. I stumbled across it only because I noticed it was listed in Malcolm McDowell’s filmography and so I looked up the trailer. But it’s not just some scruffy indie film funded on kickstarter; there’s more than a dozen listed producers and executive producers (including ROCKY director John G. Avildsen and Rob Zombie producer Andy Gould), and somebody obviously spent some money on this thing, providing it with a crisply professional crew, a gallery of recognizable actors in medium-sized roles, dozens of locations, and even a handful of huge crowd scenes. And a score co-written by Ko“Я”n’s Jonathan Davis! Holy moly! Spare no expense! They even claim there’s going to be a spin-off series? So obviously someone must have seen this, or at least someone must have had reason to believe someone would see it. But, ah. Why?

            Having now seen it myself… it’s still a fucking mystery. I can tell you a little about what happens in it, but I still can’t claim to understand it, or explain who it was made for. What I can say for sure is that I think teenagers are involved somehow, either on the supply or demand end. Because one thing that’s beyond dispute is that AMERICAN SATAN is an adorably earnest, mixed-up muddle of angst and anger and horniness and anxiety and teenage stoner philosophy, like it poured straight from the notebook doodlings of some earnest high school senior with dyed black hair and T-shirt that says “Fuck the world.” All of it is deeply and spectacularly terrible, but it’s also so adorably sincere and emo that I have no choice but to kind of love it. Can’t help myself. Oh jeez, I just realized – is the American Satan me?

The plot is less simple and clearly articulable than I’m about to make it sound, but in essence AMERICAN SATAN depicts the sad tale of youthful rocker Johnny Faust, lead singer of a band called The Relentless. Faust (yes, that seems to be his real last name – his mom is called “Mrs. Faust!”) is played by Andy Biersack, real-life singer of the band Black Veil Brides, a casting decision that makes sense --the role requires quite a number of musical performances-- until I tell you there’s a credit for “Johnny’s singing voice” and it’s another guy, vocalist Remington Leith of a band called Palaye Royale.* Which raises the question, what kind of crazy movie hires a non-actor professional singer to play the lead role of a singer, but then dubs his voice with some other singer? The mysteries of AMERICAN SATAN go deep.

            Anyway, we first encounter Johnny “The Doctor” Faust as a gloomy high school senior who lives in Columbus, Ohio with his mom (Dr. Christmas Jones herself, Denise Richards!?) and assures his mewling virginial Christian sweetheart Gretchen (beauty pageant winner Oliva Culpo) that although he has to move to LA to start a band, he’ll be back just as soon as he becomes a huge mega-star by playing unlistenable Hot Topic rock music and can afford to do what he really wants, which is to return to Ohio and marry her and settle down and live a life of quiet suburban domesticity. The first part of the plan goes amazingly well: he quickly meets a trio of bandmates (BooBoo Stewart, HE NEVER DIED, Ben Bruce of the band Asking Alexandria, Sebastian Gregory, Australian musician and actor), and the four of them recruit bassist Lily (Jesse Sullivan “Creature XXX” in the short film FUCKKKYOUUU) after a brief and unfortunate debate about whether they should let women in the band. But the second part of his plan encounters some turbulence due to the apparently unexpected perils of being a huge megastar, most of those perils instigated by the openly sinister Lily, who insists on maintaining an air of suspicious mystery when she is not manipulatively provoking trouble for everyone. Can’t a guy just become a huge superstar in a sensible, responsible manner and make enough money to buy a house in the Ohio suburbs for his sexless, blank-eyed high school prom date? Oh, the cruel caprice of fate!

            The movie does not treat any of this as a joke, by the way. It is, if nothing else, incorrigibly earnest and committed to making sure we understand the tragic gravity of this tale. And that’s part of what makes the movie so alluringly befuddling, because frankly put, the inherent wrenching tragedy of becoming a huge rock star and being deluged by money, drugs, and gorgeous naked groupies might be a little hard to relate to. But AMERICAN SATAN seems only barely aware that any of those things might conceivably sound appealing. This guy Johnny Faust is the most reluctant rock-and-roller it would be possible to invent; despite all the tattoos and the persistent gothy attitude, the movie insists on treating him as a naïve but obstinately fuddy-duddy wet blanket, who wants no part of the rock n’ roll lifestyle and would rather drink responsibly, get to bed early, file his taxes, and exchange promise rings with his abstinent, blankly wholesome high school sweetheart. He’s the most innocent cinematic rock star since everybody else in Queen except Freddy Mercury as portrayed in the movie BOHEMIAN RAPSODY. He seems apologetic and a little chagrinned even at going to a nice, quiet, oak-paneled restaurant bar booth for a few pints with his bandmate.

            And well he should be, as it turns out, for it is here that they encounter one Mr. Capricon, (Malcolm McDowell, TANK GIRL) who addresses the band (minus bass player Lily, who is always mysteriously and suspiciously absent when he shows up) with a sinister proposition: if they commit one murder, he will make them huge superstars. He seems, --well—a little devilish, but due to his British accent is demonstrably not the title character.

            Obviously this is a moral turning point. On one hand, instant mega-stardom would certainly expediate Johnny’s lifelong dream of investing in midwestern real estate. But on the other hand, is it worth a human life? They mull this over for an appropriate 30 or 40 seconds before deciding to kidnap some kid who they heard was a rapist and is definitely an asshole who calls them a homophobic slur, and lock him in their beat-up band van and set it on fire, symbolically burning the honest, humble home they had built together and becoming corrupted. Standard deal-with-the-devil stuff… except that Johnny immediately has second thoughts and sets the kid free. But then the dumbass would-be sacrificial victim, now completely safe, tries to run away and five seconds later manages to die accidentally entirely through his own stupidity. So I guess the band is off the hook, morally speaking.

But it still counts with British Satan, apparently, because they do become famous, and even their van appears again! Man, lucky break! But as they tour the country spreading their message of whatever it is that they’re shouting about in their songs, things start to turn rotten as they succumb to the lures of easy sex and omnipresent drugs, find themselves constantly under attack by angry protesters, and also, --oh yeah!-- discover that their music is inspiring a nation-wide wave of vengeful murderers. Which makes one recall that some guy who is probably the Devil seemed really invested in making them famous and may possibly have had sinister motives for doing that, especially since he continued to be real helpful even after they kind of bungled the whole “murder a guy” thing and are probably at most guilty of kidnapping and reckless endangerment, not actually murder.

This little incident with the original deal, in fact, is emblematic of the film’s spectacularly confused message. I mean, in theory, this is a pretty easy little parable about selling out your morals for fame and material excess. That’s, like, the only possible point of structuring your movie around a “deal with the devil.” But then it never quite sets this up correctly. Johnny –the only character the movie is even a little interested in—keeps getting unwillingly pushed into things, and the movie keeps refusing to make him responsible for his choices. There’s no hubris here to support a cathartic fall; he never seems like an ambitious libertine who lets his insatiable desires corrupt his soul. He seems like a humble small-town kid who doesn’t quite have the confidence to say no to peer pressure. Even when things start to get out of control and everyone is banging groupies and doing heroin and causing murders, he just keeps sort of mumbling that this isn’t a good idea and he doesn’t really want to do it. Does “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall” apply if he’s sort of ambivalent about pleasures and just doesn’t know how to politely decline? It’s enough to make you wonder whether his last name is actually a weird coincidence and not a literary reference. Which, uh, --well-- let’s just say the screenplay doesn’t make one confident its authors had read a lot of Marlowe.

The pussy-footing refusal to allow the central character to actually enjoy --or even aspire to-- the copious debauchery depicted here is so pervasive as to feel out-and-out destabilizing, like there’s some crucial context that I’m missing. In fact, for long stretches, I kept wondering, is this some sort of weird Christian-propaganda cautionary tale? That would certainly explain its overwhelmingly and persistently sordid portrayal of what should be, by any reasonable entertainment standard, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And it would explain why it’s so poisonously afraid of the spiritual debasement of the rock-and-roll lifestyle and so bizarrely uncritical of the implication that what Johnny should do is keep himself pure for marriage to his vacant-eyed young-Republican teetotaler hometown girlfriend. Ultimately I don’t think that’s what the movie intends (nothing I could find about any of the filmmakers backs up that hypothesis, anyway), but it’s hard to miss how blithely reactionary the movie feels.

This vague sense of judgmental hectoring is augmented by the fact that the movie is openly suspicious of bassist Lily, who is always agitating for trouble and mysteriously vague about her origins and never around when the Devil shows up. She’s proudly bisexual and liberated and confrontational, which one would assume a rock-n-roll themed horror movie would be enthusiastically in favor of. But we have a weird feeling she’s probably the Devil and she keeps goading them into situations where they get in trouble and is also revealed to work at a Baphomet-themed bordello which is just a few cenobites short of a HELLRAISER set, where she gets everyone hooked on drugs and debased sex with Satanic hookers and one of them dies. So… is the movie anti-sexual liberation, or… what? What are we supposed to make of that? It, ah, doesn't seem to have the most positive view of women, anyway.

Nevertheless, She Persisted.

 There’s definitely something that feels unhealthily repressed about the way the movie seems equal parts fascinated and horrified by rock and roll excess. I mean, there’s enough wild, out-of-control sex and drug orgies to make Hunter Thompson blush. In particular, the movie is absolutely drowning in female nudity (seriously, the most I’ve seen in a movie in years; Jean Rollin would find this excessive) but never in a positive or fun context where it seems like we’re supposed to be enjoying it, although obviously we are going to anyway… so? Johnny eventually ends up fucking everyone under the age of 80 who takes their top off in front of him, but he keeps weakly mumbling that he shouldn’t and it will ruin his life and his definitely-going-to-last-after-she-moves-to-college-wink-wink relationship with his virginal Christian high school girlfriend. But then he does it anyway, but looks sickened and horrified and disgusted with himself. The movie is obviously seriously getting off on this -- it spends like half the runtime salaciously ogling topless women banging the band-- but never for a moment allows it to pass without a stern lecture that this is degraded and obscene. And just in case we weren’t sure that Johnny is going down the wrong path, he also texts during a heartfelt teary speech at a funeral, which is very rude and Millennial of him. So surely this whole rock and roll thing is bad news, right?

            On the other hand, maybe not, because the movie can’t seem to make up it’s mind about whether the band is making the world better or worse, and it seems to be on-board with them in some occasionally eyebrow-raising ways. We learn that their music has been inspiring waves of violence as young people murder their bullies. Uh oh, sounds like they’re basically facilitating a wave of school shootings! No wonder the Devil wanted to make them America’s most beloved musical institution! Except that the movie seems weirdly ambivalent about whether or not that’s a bad thing. In fact, it offers several apparently earnest speeches suggesting that while it is, on the whole, probably a bad thing to murder people, well, maybe it’s time for society to change, and maybe murdering a few assholes will inspire a kinder, gentler society in the long run. Maybe this is what the revolution looks like, you know? Which is pretty, um, wow.

Similarly, it often seems like the Devil is making good points (McDowell gets some charmingly plummy speeches), and maybe even working with fellow supernatural being Gabriel (Bill Duke! What the?!), who is probably a good guy inasmuch as he speaks entirely in aphorisms. But come on, this guy’s literally the Devil and he’s played by Malcolm McDowell. There’s no way we’re supposed to think he’s right. Right? But then, if the Devil is trying to push their dangerous rock and roll excess, should we reject rock and roll and turn to Jesus? The movie sure doesn’t seem to think so; the Christian protesters and the angry rednecks they fight with are definitely not portrayed positively even though we know they’re right, this band literally is working for the dark one. At the end, after murders and arrests and random meaningless sex with dozens of teenage groupies and also possibly having sex with the Devil and getting hooked on heroin and overdosing and then coming back to life, when Jonny wants to get his head straight he goes to a Hindu guru. So, I guess the correct answer is Hinduism? But, like, the Devil and Angels are also real? And as long as you stay off the drugs, a few mass shootings are probably not such a bad thing after all? Like, what in the fresh fuck are we supposed to do with all this madness? A lot of people offer a lot of philosophy, and I have no idea who the movie thinks is right.

Like, this is definitely a sign things have taken a bad turn, correct? Can we agree on that?

 In fact, the movie’s oddly negative relationship with rock n’ roll recalls the strikingly negative portrayal of heavy metal music during the metalsploitation cycle of the 80’s. It’s hard to remember now, but in the 1980s, during the satanic panic, quite a few people genuinely believed that heavy metal music was dangerous and evil, and the metalsploitation movies of the time broadly reinforce that view, rather than challenge it, despite the fact that the presumed audience was heavy metal fans! As I noted back when I watched the quintessential metalsploitation classic BLACK ROSES in 2015,

“The only people on Earth who would conceivably enjoy this dumb movie are metalheads, so why would you write a plot where it turns out the parents are right, metal is dangerous and should be censored and condemned? My only guess is that [the filmmakers] … were banking on something I’ve long suspected: every true metalhead secretly wishes metal really was evil.”

With AMERICAN SATAN, we see something similar: although we have a movie whose whole hook is about rock music, which stars several professional musicians, and was directed by the CEO of a record label (more on that later), the life of a professional musician is almost without exception portrayed as miserable and corrupting, and the effect of their music is depicted as potentially destructive for the listener. But unlike with heavy metal, where you can see the appeal of the fantasy that listening to Dokken would summon slimy demonic puppets or whatever, I can’t see a similar tongue-in-cheek joy at playing into the stereotype here; watching someone despairingly bottom out just isn’t as much fun. That’s not the appealing part of the fantasy, right? That’s the boring second half of the VH1 Where Are They Now. And I can’t imagine even the most cynical rock n’ roll fan finds much appeal in the fantasy that listening to rock music would inspire you to become a school shooter, right?    

This is further complicated by the weird and inescapable parallels to real life: Beirsack really was a bullied teen from Ohio with some regrettable Batman-themed tattoos who dropped out of high school to move to LA and form a crappy rock act. This is basically his 8 MILE! So maybe this is a story shaped by the perspective of a young kid who indulged too much in his initial burst of fame and now looks back with disgust and regret at those years, and that colors the way the film portrays them? In a Huffington Post interview about the movie, Director Ash Avildsen (2015’s WHAT NOW) stresses this point: “With the exception of the physical manifestation of Satan, everything in the film is based on real events. Either myself, or these guys, or the producers have had these experiences in the rock music scene. It didn’t take that much crazy imagination, even though when people see it they’ll say ‘how did they think of that?”’ (Note: No human being has ever or will ever watch this movie and say “how did they think of that?”). Fair enough, so I guess this is all about gritty reality, then? But wait, in that same interview, Beirsack draws a clear distinction between himself and the character. While noting that their origins are identical, he says, “The difference is I didn’t make a deal with a deity… [T]here’s so many divergences in paths that you can take to success… You can sometimes forget where you came from initially… I don’t know what I would have done if I had the chance to become very successful out of nowhere. When you’re hungry and you want nothing more than to have that success, who knows what you would do if someone presented you with the keys to the kingdom?” So it sounds like he took a very different path than the one we see here.

In fact, while Avildsen is the founder and CEO of Sumerian Records (who, predictably, rep Black Veil Brides, Asking Alexandria, Palaye Royale, and Jonathan Davis, along with Between the Buried and Me (!) and briefly the Dillinger Escape Plan (!!)) and is obviously in a good position to have heard the tales of some of those “real events” the movie depicts, the whole approach has a weirdly dated feel. The legendary drug-fueled groupie-banging excess AMERICAN SATAN wallows in was a feature of 70’s and 80’s metal bands, and sure enough, those are the bands that get name-checked as a reference point. But the movie is aggressively set, like, RIGHT NOW. Avildsen is explicit on this topic: “…I wanted to have the music sound like what a big band might sound like today… I wanted to be like “Okay, what if Tool was a more mainstream heavy metal band with more raspy punk vocals?”. So I strayed away from having the band sound classic rock, I wanted it to sound modern and relevant. We weren’t ambiguous with the time frame… We wanted to make it clear that this was present day.” But do the kids today do this shit? I feel like Biersack’s actual bandmates are probably teetotalers who took their rock and roll money and prudently invested in it.

            In fact, I’d go out on a limb and hypothesize that the “real events” Avildsen is recalling were likely related to him by members of an older generation (he was born in 1981).** And that’s part of the movie’s weird vibe; it’s the story of a bunch of distinctly modern millennial kids who are for some reason living out a particularly 1980’s experience that doesn’t really exist anymore. The result of this generational mismatch is that the film curiously smothers a tale of unmistakably bygone 1980’s debauchery with a thick layer of fretful millennial anxiety. But those two mindsets sit very strangely together. In the cocaine-dusted innocence of the 80’s, a hedonistic focus on the pleasure of the moment made sense; placing a bunch of painfully self-aware burnt-out twentysomethings –who, remember, have on average way less sex than their 80’s counterparts did and with a great deal more stress-- into that same scenario feels bizarre and unnatural. In order to get the characters to work themselves into a respectable heedless decadence, they require some direct pressure from the Devil himself – and even then they still feel anxious and guilty and conflicted and certain that they’re ruining everything.

Speaking of modern anxiety, there’s also a truly wonderful amount of time spent discussing stoner occult conspiracy theories. I think someone even gets a dollar bill and does the thing where you fold it up and reveal a secret message. There’s definitely a lengthy discussion of the famous Apple 666/original sin conspiracy. Why? No idea. Maybe just generalized awesomeness? But probably for the same reason, whatever it is, that the movie includes about 60,000 words of intertitles during the credits quoting various musicians talking vaguely about dark magic. Like all movies with “American” in the title, it obviously feels certain that it’s really getting at something universal and potent about the cultural moment (or at least that it’s close enough to hide behind that claim as an excuse to trot out a bunch of tits and a promotional CD for the director’s label, which is, if anything, probably a more venerable tradition). But unlike AMERICAN GANGSTER, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and AMERICAN HUSTLE (“it’s about Capitalism, man”) or AMERICAN PIE and AMERICAN BEAUTY (it’s about sex, man”) or AMERICAN SNIPER (“it’s about brittle authoritarian masculinity… or maybe we’re just awesome?”), I genuinely emerged from the entire none-too-brief, densely-packed-yet-oddly-uneventful 112 minutes without a single solid guess as to what the point here is supposed to be. Is it about the dark side of ambition? About the corrosive effect of fame? About a sinister satanic conspiracy to corrupt the youth? A sinister satanic conspiracy to liberate the youth? About being careful what you wish for? About just, like, not doing heroin and maybe not fucking so many groupies?

There’s something like 25 minutes devoted to a weird tangent where a nice suburban mom talks her way into bringing her virginal teenage daughter onto the tour bus to be deflowered by Johnny (!), and then while they’re at it she ends up fucking someone else, maybe even Bill Goldberg (HALF PAST DEAD 2, who, unless I dreamed this, shows up as their tour manager or something?) and it’s this nutty thing, but despite the somewhat disturbing implications it seems like both mother and daughter are into it and maybe even having a kind of weird bonding experience. Again, this sounds like something that Poison had to deal with more than anything that’s happened to any band that became famous in the past 30 years or so, but I’ll take it: it seems to be a rare lighthearted moment of debauchery where everyone had a good time. But then a few scenes later, we cut to mom and daughter at home, when their husband/father finds out what happened, grabs a handgun, and blows his brains out! What the fuck, dude! Nothing narratively substantive comes of it but it’s such a weirdly specific little vignette that you gotta figure it means something—but what?

Oh yeah I forgot to mention, that Game Of Thrones guy is in there. Not Hodor, the other one. Hurley. No wait, that was Lost. You know the one I mean. That guy.

            The movie’s most baffling turn comes at the finale, which has already started to get a little narratively abstract (long story short, Booboo Stewart, who plays a guitarist apparently named “Vic Lakota,” does a CNN interview on acid where Larry King appears as himself, and may genuinely not have known he was interviewing a fictional band). ---PLEASE NOTE: I’m going to spoil the ending, I guess, although I’m not really sure what I’m even describing here.-- “Mr. Capricorn,” alarmed that Johnny seems to be increasingly ambivalent about the whole experience, starts dating his mom (?) and meanwhile Johnny has been fucking Lily, who of course we suspect is probably the Devil in disguise (man, what is it about this movie and weird parallel incest tropes?). In the big finale, Lily vanishes and Mr, Capricorn appears and tells Johnny that he wants him to commit a murder on stage to, like, ignite the revolution or whatnot. And to further provoke him, he reveals what we’ve suspected all along, that haha, it was he, Malcolm McDowell, who has hiding inside the nubile body of the Relentless’s bisexual liberated female bassist all along, spurring them forward to this climactic point (and although he doesn’t specifically mention it, that means our boy was banging beloved character actor Malcolm McDowell in disguise!). Oh shit!

            …Except not, because after this huge reveal there’s a little coda with one line of dubbed dialogue at the end which tells us that none of that was true. I guess the Devil was just lying and all that suspicious stuff Lily did was just a coincidence and she’s just a normal human, except sort of a bitch I guess (we’re told she’s a heroin addict who is now in recovery, and she never appears or gets mentioned again and nobody seems to think her behavior requires any further explanation).*** A baffling turn for an inexplicable character in a indecipherable riddle of a movie. Or, alternately, a desperate last minute re-write so they could spin off a series (and, less charitably, possibly also to safely assure us that don’t worry bro, no homo shit here). Either way, it kind of raises the question of, what did the Devil actually do here, anyway? I’m not sure how he helped them, and Johnny doesn’t even seem to think it would be altogether a thing bad if he did – the movie seems to ultimately adopt the stance that maybe God and the Devil are both a little right, and maybe the thing to do is to kind of let them balance each other out. Which, in practice, means that a few school shootings are probably a necessary evil, but we don’t want to start a whole revolution here, that would be going too far.

            Actually, I feel the movie would probably have benefited from going too far; as it is, it feels tentative and vaguely formed, with plenty of provocation but not a lot of real substance, or, hell, even any real narrative arc. For a movie with some real crazy turns, it’s an oddly passive, languid thing. Still, I kind of admire its goofy, earnest, mixed-up spirit. Almost certainly without meaning to, it captures something that feels kind of real about the teenage experience, when the world feels overwhelming and oppressive and everything –God, the Devil, Good, Evil, Sex, Partying, Sick Riffs, Identity, The Man, Society, The Future, Texting, Responsibility, Stoner Conspiracies, Porn, Bitchin’ Tats, and everything else in a young person's**** life just sort of spills over without any real structure or logic. It’s all very dumb, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply felt. That doesn’t exactly make for a good movie, but it does make for one which is probably more charming and unusual than a more traditionally good version would be. It stinks, but at least it smells like teen spirit.   

*I know this, of course, from my usual high level of background research; you can rest assured that I had no prior knowledge whatsoever of what a “Palaye Royale” or whatever might be.

** It occurred to me that this tracks with the fact that he might well have grown up around hard-partying celebrities, because his dad was John G. Avildsen (ROCKY, NEIGHBORS, the KARATE KID). But then I read this rather heartbreaking interview which makes it painfully clear that he never met his father and probably didn’t even benefit from his financial success (the one time he saw him as a child was at a family court hearing over child support, where John refused to acknowledge he was present. Jesus!). Although since the elder Alvidsen is a producer on this movie, one assumes they must have met at least once since that 2015 interview. But unless they made up for lost father-son time by exclusively discussing John’s partying with Stallone in the 70’s, I doubt he was the source for these anecdotes. So I dunno. Maybe he heard these stories from grizzled old roadies? He did work with Steve Adler from Guns N’ Roses in his 2015 movie WHAT NOW, so maybe this is all stuff that specifically happened to Steve Adler.

*** I notice actress Jesse Sullivan is the only person to be recast for the spin-off show; I’m not sure exactly what happened here, but that’s obviously a clue of some sort. It’s a shame, though, because she’s giving far and away the most interesting performance in the movie, although the fact that she’s the only character who isn’t utterly passive about everything probably helps.

**** I say young person, but the movie is utterly oblivious to the idea that there might be a perspective other than a young man’s; the only female character who isn’t a completely passive object for male characters to act upon is Lily, who is a destabilizing bitch, and also a sex object. I don’t think the movie is aware of this at all, but its complete disinterest in the inner lives of its female characters is another way in which it feels startlingly dated.

Trick Or Treat (1986)

Trick Or Treat (1986) aka Ragman aka Muerte a 33 revoluciones por minuto

Dir. Charles Martin Smith

Written by Joel Soisson, Michael S. Murphey, Rhet Topman

Starring Marc Price, Tony Fields, Lisa Orgolini, Gene Simmons

Now this is more like it. After the boring, rank incompetence of ROCKTOBER BLOOD, here, we finally have a metalsploitation movie that gets it. In fact, it may be the only metalsploitation movie that gets it. Metalsploitation, as you’ll recall, is the subgenre which marries the two least subtle forms of art ever devised by man, heavy metal music and 80’s schlock horror. There are not, in all honesty, a whole lot of these movies. Most sources seem to agree that the core of the genre consists of TERROR ON TOUR (1980), ROCKTOBER BLOOD (1984), HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1985), TRICK OR TREAT (1986), ROCK AND ROLL NIGHTMARE (1987), SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (but not Part I), and BLACK ROSES (1988) and then various sources also list MONSTER DOG (1984), THE DUNGEONMASTER (1984 -- included because it has a W.A.S.P. cameo), BLOOD TRACKS (1985), DREAMANIAC (1986), VICIOUS LIPS (1986), LONE WOLF (1988), HARD ROCK NIGHTMARE (1988), PAGANINI HORROR (1989), arguably MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (which has an all-AC/DC sore --not soundtrack, score--), HEAVY METAL MASSACRE (1989), SHOCK ‘EM DEAD (1991), DEATH METAL ZOMBIES (1995), TURBULANCE 3: HEAVY METAL (2001), more recently HAIR METAL MASSACRE (2014), DEATHGASM (2015)... actually you know what, there are a whole lot of these movies.

But I’ve seen a good chunk of that list now, and while most of them are plenty fun, they have one consistent problem. Like most exploitation movies, they don’t seem to be made by anyone with any real affection for the demographic they’re exploiting. I don’t think the makers of HARD ROCK ZOMBIES spent a lot of time listening to the hottest new hard rock albums any more than I think Golan and Globus just had such an intense personal love of breakdancing that they just had to share it with the world through BREAKIN’ (and combine it with their love of Electric Boogaloos for the sequel). That tends to leave these movies feeling a bit shallow, the work of people with a superficial sense of the most stereotypical trappings of a current trend, but not a lot of genuine understanding of its psychological underpinning and its complex internal mechanics.

Why the fuck does that matter in a genre where there’s a pretty good chance there’s gonna be a demon or something who shoots a lightning bolt out of an electric guitar and blows someone up while ripping a sick solo? Well, TRICK OR TREAT demonstrates why it does. This is, perhaps, the quintessential metalsploitation movie, and, appropriately, it’s completely full of ridiculous metal shit. But it’s also the only one of these movies I’ve seen which seems to have an actual understanding about who these goofy metalheads are, other than a market that will pretty much watch any shitty horror movie you can crank out that has Motörhead on the soundtrack, or, hell, even Fastway. And, crucially, it’s a movie which is actually about those metalheads. Virtually every other metalsploitation film to really linger on the gimmick invariably posits a band as its central protagonists. But by virtue of the intrinsic character of their art, metal musicians are larger-than-life groupie-banging Übermensches, which makes them kind of narratively inert. They already have what they want, and their cartoonish embodiment of hyper-sexualized masculine virility doesn’t allow them to seem especially vulnerable, either emotionally or physically, in a way which parlays well into a workable horror narrative. And it goes without saying, it also doesn’t make them a very relatable crowd for the average Joe.

TRICK OR TREAT craftily avoids this dilemma by shifting the focus from the demigods to their acolytes. The protagonists of this story will not be anyone who has ever strutted across a stage while thousands screamed their name in boundless devotion. It will not even be about the people who screamed in devotion. It will be about the guys who couldn’t get off work to go to the show --and even if they could, they’d have to borrow their moms’ car-- but nonetheless live an intense half-life in the world of fanzines, fantastical album art, and ubiquitous rock posters tattooed across the obliging walls of their basement bedrooms in the boring suburbs. They’re not rich, they’re not that clever, they dress poorly, nobody thinks they’re cool, and they’re definitely not getting the girl. In other words, the vast majority of actual heavy metal fans, and I say this as someone who counts himself as a heavy metal fan.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this makes for a movie which gets a lot more mileage from its metal trappings, and offers an experience it might just be possible to enjoy unironically, or at least only partially ironically. TRICK OR TREAT isn’t exactly THE SHINING, but compared to SHOCK ‘EM DEAD, or even delightfully tacky brain candy like ROCK AND ROLL NIGHTMARE, it’s CITIZEN (fuckin’) KANE. It’s a pretty competent effort with all the requisite metal goodies you crave, but also with, you know, characters and a plot and stuff which seems to have been written by someone with at least a passing experience with real humans. That’s not saying a lot, but in this subgenre, it’s roughly equivalent to hailing it as a masterpiece.

The plot concerns high-school metalhead Eddie Weinbauer (or, as he’d prefer to be known, to the profound disinterest of everyone else on Earth, “The Ragman”)(Marc Price, stand up comedian and Family Ties cast-member), a troubled kid who gets mercilessly bullied in high school by day and pens letters to his hero, heavy metal musician Sammi Curr (who attended Ragman’s school some years before him), at night. The bullying is broad enough to be right at home in any 80’s teen romp (the jocks trick him him to falling naked into a girl’s volleyball practice, and lock the door behind him), but right away, the movie takes his misery a little more seriously than you’d expect. “Sometimes -- actually kind of a lot lately -- I think about some pretty radical things,” he writes to Sammi. “Why not just end it? Be done with it all? Dead. Gone. But you know something? The one thing that holds me together is you. You. You did it man. You went to this fuckin’ school, and you rose above it.”  It’s pretty clear he’s thinking about suicide.

That’s some pretty heavy shit for minute five of a movie where yes, a lightning bolt from a guitar solo will cause someone to explode, but the genius of the movie is that it understands exactly why these two seemingly disparate tones are both intrinsically part of the soul of Heavy Metal music. Eddie is not a deep thinker, but he is a deep feeler. He lacks the ability to express his deep, painful feelings of rejection in a way which isn’t profoundly stupid and filled with doodles of monsters, but that doesn’t make them any less deep and painful. TRICK OR TREAT understands that metal is fundamentally stupid, but it also gets why a guy like Ragman needs it so badly. Why the grotesque morbidity, operatic instrumentation, over-the-top-and-back-around hyper-masculinity, and cartoonish aggression make so much sense to him. In that way, it’s almost a peer of SUMMER OF SAM, a movie which I think makes much the same case for the necessity of Punk Rock in the repressive, feverish 70’s urban hellscape. Obviously it’s not as good as that one (which I consider something of a misunderstood masterpiece), but it makes a similar, and similarly sympathetic, case for the necessity of Metal to the spirit-crushing homogeneous white suburbs of the 80’s.

Not that, you know, TRICK OR TREAT is any more a deep thinker than its protagonist. But still, it has the discipline to build a little bit, and just enough substance that it’s endurable before the killing starts. We meet Ragman at a pretty low point. He’s bullied in and out of school by clique-y jocks, he gets no respect from the ladies, and to top it all off, his hero, heavy metal musician Sammi Curr (Tony Fields, dancer and sometimes-actor who appeared in the Thriller and Beat It videos, and in CAPTAIN EO) has just died in a hotel fire. In desperation, he shows up at the local radio station to vent to his friend, DJ Nuke (Gene Simmons, KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK). Nuke tries to gently remind him that for all his musical talent, Sammi Curr was maybe not the nicest guy in the world. “Eddie, he wasn’t a God... You didn’t know him. He was angry. He was always angry, even in high school… He did this to himself, don’t you get it? He started to believe his own hype.” Again, they don’t quite say it outright, but I take this as an implication that Curr has probably killed himself, just like Ragman’s been thinking about.

“No, it wasn’t him. He stood up for what he believed in, and they nailed him for it!” Ragman shoots back. “They tried to fuck him over everywhere he went. I know what that’s like.” This dialogue reads a little overwrought on the page, but the combination of Price’s guileless lameness and Simmons’ surprisingly kindly delivery makes it work. It’s obviously kind of a hoot to see Simmons (and later Ozzy Osbourne!) in a metalsploitation movie, but actually Simmons (three years after KISS took off their makeup, to much initial excitement and subsequent deadening disappointment) seems to really be making an effort here, he’s unexpectedly convincing and likable as this small-town radio DJ who takes enough pity on poor, rejected Eddie to treat him with a respect he probably doesn’t really deserve (I note that Nuke is the only person who calls Eddie “Ragman” like he wants them to). It’s kind of sweet.

Unfortunately this does not work out so well for anyone in the end, because Nuke offers Eddie a gift: the sole master copy of Curr’s unreleased final album. At first I thought it was funny that a radio DJ would A) have the only copy of the unreleased final album from a now-dead artist and B) hand it over for free to an angry alienated high-schooler. But actually I think it’s just evidence for how small-potatoes this band that Eddie worships so much was. Now that they’re dead, no one is pushing for the release of their final album, there’s no money to be made here. Might as well give it to a true fan.

Alas, this particular record is not so benign as Nuke thinks. After a brutal day, in which a well-meaning girl (a likeable Lisa Orgolini, “tourist #1” in HIDEOUS KINKY) invites him to a cool kid party but shows up too late to prevent him from getting humiliated, Eddie angrily throws on the record and falls asleep. But he wakes up to find it skipping backward at the end of the track (this was something which was theoretically possible on vinyl, kids, try it at home with your obnoxious hipster friend’s turntable). It seems that Curr left backwards messages on his final record. I honestly can’t really make out what he’s saying without the aid of subtitles, but the words seem to have some kind of supernatural effect. Suddenly, whenever Ragman is around electrical equipment, especially when playing his home-dubbed tape (is that legal? Hopefully the ghost of Sammi Curr isn’t the litigious type), he seems to have magical abilities to punish his enemies.

This is exhilarating at first -- emboldened by his heavy metal mojo, he throws food in his

tormentor’s face at lunch, and then nimbly tricks him into dousing the teachers’ lounge with a fire extinguisher. Primo hijinks! But things get a little more serious when the head bully (Doug Savant, minor film roles, but he’s basically been in everything to ever appear on TV, from Love Boat to JAG to Desperate Housewives to The X-Files) corners him for revenge in the high school metal shop (?). Just as he’s about the get clobbered, the bully gets his 80’s-guy tie caught in the machinery, and a convenient death spike starts ratcheting closer and closer to braining him. Ragman has to think about it for a moment, but then he steps in and saves him (to notably tepid gratitude. You’d think this would be the kind of thing that would bring them together, but nope. No fight brothers in TRICK OR TREAT). This clinches it: the backwards record has somehow imbued our hero with subtle supernatural powers to avenge himself!

Two victories in row put Ragman on cloud nine, and he zips out of his high school in fine spirits, whizzing past a historical marker dedicated to Johnson Jones Hooper, the 19th-century American Humorist known for his stories about the irrepressible Alabaman rascal Captain Simon Suggs.* Ragman might have approved of Hooper’s boundary-pushing and racy humor, which in some ways mirrors the boundary-pushing sex and violence which made his beloved heavy metal music so controversial in the 1980’s, but he doesn’t stop to read the historical marker, which is a real shame because it honestly might have given him some perspective. I mention it mostly because --thanks to the miraculous freeze-frame technology which exists today-- this landmark definitively establishes that our action is set in Wilmington, North Carolina, and that Ragman specifically attends New Hanover High School, at 1307 Market Street, Wilmington NC, 28401 (re-christened as “Lakewood High School” for the movie). Graduates of that school include longtime NBC and ABC news anchor David Brinkley and The Simpsons writer Don Payne (co-writer of the 16th-season highlight Thank God It’s Doomsday, as well as the two THOR movies)**, who would have graduated in 1982, just a short time before Ragman’s tenure there. It appears from Google Maps that a median added sometime after the movie was filmed has made it impossible to pull out of perpendicular 14th Street and onto Market Street while ignoring the stop sign, as Ragman does in the movie, so those of you hoping to recreate this classic sequence IRL might be out of luck. Probably just as well; looks like it was a pretty unsafe intersection in 1986. That’s progress for you; more safety, but less character.

Anyway, things seem to be going well for Eddie, and he has one more bit of revenge to indulge in: trick his nemesis into listening to the Sammi Curr tape backwards, which will presumably result in some spooky shenanigans. Unfortunately, the tape finds its way to the wrong target, because while the bully inexplicably abandons his bitchy girlfriend in the backseat of a car (“uh, I gotta go,” he says by way of explanation, before stepping out. Maybe he has to pee?) she gets bored and puts on the tape. Though all these mean kids hate heavy metal, the subtle sensuality of the Sammi Curr band proves too much for her, and she falls into a hypnotic sexed-up trance, allowing a mysterious green mist to awkwardly undress her (in the backseat of a car, no mean feat) and then dump a pervy demon puppet into her lap. When her paramore inexplicably returns moments later, he finds her literally fried by the power of heavy metal, her brains melting out through the smoking holes in her headphones. Admittedly a very metal way to die, but I don’t think this poor girl was cool enough to have appreciated it.

Now, here the movie comes to a turning point, because holy shit, now Ragman has killed someone.*** Granted, he couldn't really have predicted this outcome. And granted, this girl was a complete bitch. But still, she didn’t deserve to die. And when her boyfriend shows up at his house to demand answers, he stands menacing on his porch, staring the boyfriend down, while his new metal powers make the jack-o-lanterns (ah! That explains the movie's name!) burn with supernatural vigor. It works -- the bully is genuinely intimidated and flees the scene, lamely begging Ragman to stay away from him.

So here we’re getting into uncomfortable territory, at least to modern eyes. Because let’s face it, at this point Ragman is basically a school shooter, an alienated outsider lashing out violently (and, seemingly, fatally***) at everyone he perceives to be his tormentors. Yet another cinematic fantasy about disempowered young white men self-actualizing through vindictive acts of violence. We could always use a few more of those, I guess. But, blessedly, Ragman is better than that. He’s become the bully now, and immediately he knows that’s not the role he wants to play. This is getting out of hand. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He’s ready to call it quits with the supernatural vengeance business. Unfortunately, this is the exact moment that Sammi Curr himself appears out of the backwards-spinning, animated-80’s-electricity-spewing record. And it turns out he is angry, just like Gene Simmons said.

See, Ragman and Sammi really do have something in common: they were both treated like shit at the same high school, years apart, presumably due to their shared predilection for loud music and dressing like this:

But Sammi is back for brutal revenge against the whole world, and Ragman doesn’t want any part of it. “No wimps. No false metal.” Sammi sneers at him, when the youth protests that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. And just like that, Ragman is suddenly the only person who can stop his former hero before he starts murdering his asshole classmates. In a way, then, we’ve got an interesting iteration of the horror premise that George “R. R.” Romero has played around with on and off when not making zombie movies, (I explored it in my “Not of the Living Dead” series some years back), where the protagonists’ most antisocial desires get acted out against their will. Ragman has every reason to hate the assholes who have made his life a living hell, and even pushed him to the point of contemplating suicide. I’m sure he’s fantasized about killing them. But when it comes down to it, even given a nudge by this idol, he knows where he stands. He’s going to be the bigger man here, he’s going to do the right thing even if no one else will.

Unfortunately, his supernaturally imbued mentor will not take no for an answer, and is extremely peeved by Ragman’s totally not metal anti-murder stance. Abandoning the kid who summoned him, Curr threatens Ragman’s nerdy friend Roger (Glen Morgan, writer/director for The X-Files and the remakes of WILLARD and BLACK CHRISTMAS, in his only acting role)**** and gets him to play the backwards tape at the big Halloween dance at school. Well, you can guess how well that goes. When the corny metal band playing the gig doesn’t rock sufficiently hard for the angry spirit, he bursts out of the amp and blows up the lead singer (Special Effects artist and later half-director of the disowned HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE Kevin Yagher) and takes over the stage. The kids think this is totally rad, which is odd because I seem to remember recently in this very movie that the popular kids hate metal and think Ragman is total freak for enjoying it. But never underestimate the power of a good stage show. Actor Tony Fields was primarily a dancer, and knows how to strike a proper metal pose. He’s got the audience in such rapture they don’t even start to panic when he starts shredding a solo and simultaneously blowing away audience members (including their principal, director Charles Martin Smith [AMERICAN GRAFFITI] in a cameo) with lightning bolts. It honestly takes about five people getting incinerated in front of everybody before the crowd starts to catch on that this is not part of the act and all hell breaks loose. In classic metalsploitation style, though, his backing band (who, remember, have no idea who this guy is and just saw him explode their singer) just keep on rockin’. Priorities, man. Curr is a total asshole who wants to murder innocent kids, but even so, he has his priorities straight, too. Even after blowing up his own band because everyone else has fled, he can’t stop shredding until the sheer power of his metal blows up the guitar he’s manhandling.

Meanwhile, Ragman is having problems of his own. He’s trying to get to school to stop the madness, but Curr gets into the electronics of his car, and starts driving it recklessly all over the place and causing havoc. Seems that Curr has somehow become a being of pure electricity, able to appear through and control any technology, though of course he prefers to stick with the musical theme. This is the movie’s one weakness, because the comparison with SHOCKER becomes unmistakable, and no one wants to be compared to SHOCKER, even positively (though this came first). Being a phantasm of pure electricity, Ragman reasons, his nemesis should be destroyed with water. And I’m sorry, I refuse to be frightened of any enemy who can be defeated by a foggy day. Lookin at you, SIGNS and NEON MANIACS.

While both electricity and corny animated lightning bolts are definitely a big, big part of metal, they’re not synonymous, and it unnecessarily muddies what was, up til this point, an absolutely pristine metalsploitation gimmick. If we’re gonna do this metalsploitation thing, I need you to stay on theme. Water does not stop metal. Death does not stop metal. Only getting a girlfriend stops metal, and even then, only sometimes. And this was a less enlightened time, when women had to pretend they actually enjoyed prolonged noodly guitar solos and feathered mullets, so even that wouldn’t work in this case. Which raises the question, what would stop the metal? I considered the possibility that the only thing that could defeat Metal would be its polar opposite, smooth jazz, but no, that’s too wussy. Wouldn’t work. Metal wins. No, I’ve given this some thought, and consulted the highest possible authorities on the subject, and come to the conclusion that there is only one way to defeat the metal, and that is with more metal. The correct ending to the movie is Ragman luring Curr to a GWAR show, where even the murderous reanimated hair-metal god is forced to admit that their brutality is superior to his own, whereupon he gives up and retires to the suburbs to occasionally tweet some embarrassingly tone-deaf right-wing talking points. That’s how you stop the metal. That, and I guess late-period reunion tours. And Nirvana. OK, there are lots of ways to stop the metal, but water is definitely not one of them, I guess that’s the point.

Anyway, despite my misgivings about the finale, (which does, in its defense, continue to at least peripherally revolve around music paraphernalia; Curr wants to take his act national by hijacking Nuke’s radio tower, and Ragman has to lure him out with a dubbed tape of his act) the movie’s a total joy overall. Could it use more gore and a more focused gimmick than “electricity slasher”? Sure,

couldn’t we all? But --quite unusually for the genre-- it also has enough other things going for it that it can afford to not quite stick the landing. It’s startlingly nice-looking, for one thing, which makes sense when you realize that the DP was none other than Academy-Award winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (THERE WILL BE BLOOD, NIGHTCRAWLER, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK [and also GIGLI, but we won’t hold that against him]), who’d shot his first movie a mere four years earlier. First-time director Charles Martin Smith --who you remember from his frequent guest appearances on the panel game show Match Game, because you’ve forgotten that that was actually Charles Nelson Reilly-- gives a surprisingly classic, Spielbergian feel to the proceedings, allowing Ragman’s situation to escalate slowly but surely, and allowing plenty of surprisingly earnest domestic details of his life to slip in without getting bogged down in them. Smith is primarily an actor, and I suspect it’s his influence which results in the performances here --despite a pretty conventional script-- feeling a little more vivacious and genuine than you usually get from the horror genre.*****

But it’s the script itself that really puts this one over the top, I think. Not because it’s especially well-written, but because it’s perhaps the only metalsploitation movie which really gets some mileage out of the genre. You’ve got a legit respectable metal soundtrack by Fastway (featuring former Motörhead guitar “Fast” Eddie Clarke and then-unknown Irish vocalist Dave King, who, nearly a decade later, would re-emerge to much greater fame as the singer for the Celtic punk band Flogging Molly). You’ve got the idea of hidden backwards messages in metal albums which supernaturally control kids (a persistent paranoia of the anti-metal crowd, which reached its zenith in 1990, when Judas Priest would be the subject of a lawsuit alleging their 1978 cover of Better By You, Better Than Me contained hidden messages urging listeners to kill themselves, which would not be a very good business practice in my opinion). You’ve got the implication that heavy metal musicians are Satanic practitioners of the dark arts (the film opens with an incantation to Satan!). You’ve got a huge metal show which erupts into mass carnage a la Metalocalypse, scary faces coming out of a “Schall” halfstack amp, and a vaguely defined fear that devil music will take to the airwaves and destroy civilization, or at least the morals of the youth. Like with BLACK ROSES, I initially found it odd that a movie which is clearly targeted at metalheads would so happily play up all the worst --and in retrospect, most hilarious misplaced-- fears about the genre, but as longtime friend of the site Dan P reminded me, of course they had that stuff in there: metalheads secretly want nothing more than to believe that deep down, Tipper Gore was right, metal truly is evil. How are you supposed to feel dangerous and anti-establishment otherwise?

But TRICK OR TREAT wisely plays it both ways; although Sammi Curr really is everything your momma warned you about in heavy metal, Ragman himself is a total sweetie, unfairly targeted for abuse because of people’s misconceptions about metalheads. And if you really wanted to know where the movie stands on the dangers of heavy metal, look no further than Ozzy Osbourne (GHOSTBUSTERS 2016) in a cameo as a Televangelist railing against the improprieties of the genre he helped create. “This could kick you off into becoming an absolute pervert!” he huffs. Ozzy’s not the world’s most convincing actor, but you know he’s done enough of these stupid hysterical talk shows that I’m sure he didn’t need a script to parrot all the absurd fearmongering accusations leveled against his music. And TRICK OR TREAT knows them too, and knows that our shared knowledge of both the hype and the reality is where the fun really lies. That’s the charm here, really. Like any true metalhead, it gets its kicks through pervy sex and over-the-top violence. But it gets its heart from its good-natured certainty that it’s all in good fun. Sammi Curr never understood that, but Ragman does. Particularly given the context here, I can’t help but recall the scene in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, where shock-metal maven Marilyn Manson (“Porno Star #1” in LOST HIGHWAY) --widely accused of inspiring the then-shocking, now-sadly-routine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado-- is asked what he would say to the kids at Columbine. “I wouldn’t say a single word to them, I would listen to what they have to say.” he says. In a genre which spends a lot of time mining the most superficially shocking ephemera of heavy metal music, TRICK OR TREAT is a rare metalsploitation movie which actually takes his advice. The result is one of the most unabashed love letters to 80’s metal the horror genre has ever produced -- a film with real heart. And, also an exploding guitar solo.

Death to false metal, indeed.

* Though Hooper was born in North Carolina, he became famous in (and for writing about) Alabama, where he spent the majority of his professional career. He has another historical marker in Dadeville, Alabama, which actually seems like a more appropriate place for it.

** He also wrote segments for TREEHOUSE OF HORROR XI and XII, so maybe he and Ragman could have been friends. Granted, the segments he wrote are parodies of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and, of all fool things, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, so maybe it wouldn’t be a perfect match. Oh well, at least the second one turned out pretty good. Woah, Payne died of bone cancer in 2013, at the age of 48. That’s a horrible bit of trivia which you now know.

*** Actually I guess not, because the boyfriend later tells Ragman that she’s in the hospital, that she could have been killed. This feels like something maybe added in at the last minute to make it more palatable, but maybe she just didn’t really need her brain too badly and could afford to have it melted. It being the 80’s, the icky demonic sexual assault is less of a problem as far as the script is concerned.

**** I note that Morgan’s writing partner James Wong hired "Lead Bully" Doug Savant for a major role in his 10th-season X-Files episode Founder’s Mutation. I wonder if Morgan remembered him from their work together on this? Oh, and Charles Martin Smith also had a guest role on the X-Files, early on in season 2.  

***** TRICK OR TREAT is the only horror movie Smith ever directed, but he would go on to something far more terrifying: in 1997, he directed AIR BUD, the “there’s no rule that says a golden retriever can’t play basketball!” opus which has spawned more sequels than fucking HELLRAISER. And yet poor TRICK OR TREAT languishes without even a proper DTV sequel. For shame!

By the way, speaking of false metal, this is the DVD cover they went with during the brief period it was in print. You'll note that both these images are from decades later, and that the two people pictured here have a combined 3 minutes of screentime total, and one is just on a TV the main character (credited third) is watching. And also I don't know what that building is in the background that's on fire. And the only skull in the movie is on the cover of Megadeth's Killing Is My Business.. and Business is Good. But other than those few details its completely accurate to the movie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

TAGLINE	What are you afraid of? It's only rock and roll… is what’s on my version of this poster (yes, I have an original theatrical poster for this movie up in my house) but a more literal alternate tagline is If you think Sammi Curr looks like he's been to hell and back... it's because he has! Which is pretty much the same one as ROCKTOBER BLOOD, which, now that I think of it, has a similar plot point or two.
LITERARY ADAPTATION	No
SEQUEL	None, which is just awful.
REMAKE	None
DEADLY IMPORT FROM:	USA
FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK	No
SLUMMING A-LISTER	None. But you gotta like a movie with cameos from Gene Simmons, Ozzy Osbourne, Kevin Yagher, and Charles Martin Smith. I mean, not many movies can claim that kind of oddness.
BELOVED HORROR ICON	Kevin Yagher?
NUDITY?	Yup
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Via demonic green mist. It’s pretty mild though, and she seems kinda into it.
GORE?	Surprisingly little. The people who get blown up seem to just kind of vaporize. Resurrected Sammi Curr’s gnarly facial scars are probably the goriest thing in the movie. But don’t let that bring you down, he does reach through a TV and grab Alice Nunn’s body and burn her to a tiny crisp in one of the film’s ballsiest and most bizarre scenes.
HAUNTED HOUSE?	Haunted… record?
MONSTER?	No
UNDEAD?	Ghostly Rock N’ Roller!
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	It looks like Sammi Curr has been up to something vaguely satanic, and the movie begins with an incantation to Satan, but it’s pretty vague about it. However, I think all movies should begin with a Satanic incantation, like how they close ballgames with the national anthem, or whatever it is they do.
SLASHER/GIALLO?	Yes, technically a slasher, probably, at least in structure, though the electricity gimmick means instead of knives there’s animated lightning.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Eh, nah, not really.

OBSCURITY LEVEL	I honestly don’t really have a sense of this. I never heard of it before this October, if that means anythng.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never meet your heroes.
TITLE ACCURACY	TRICK OR TREAT is an absolutely ludicrous title for this movie which is coincidentally set over Halloween, though there’s very, very little reference to the season other than a few Jack-O-Lanterns and a costumed “Halloween Dance.” I prefer the German title “Ragman,” although it sounds kind of like a low-rent superhero movie. But I think Spain has the best title: Muerte a 33 revoluciones por minuto or, Death at 33 revolutions per minute. Now THAT’s a good album title.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE?	N/A