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.

He Never Died

He Never Died (2015)

Dir. and written by Jason Krawczyk

Starring Henry Rollins, Steven Ogg, Jordan Todosey, Kate Greenhouse, Booboo Stewart

I’ve often lamented on this blog that a mystery is --almost inevitably-- going to be more satisfying than a solution. This is something of a catch-22, of course, because a mystery without a solution is often equally unsatisfying, a long come-on followed by a coquettish rebuff. But how, in this world of savvy filmgoers, are they really going to come up with a mystery intriguing enough to capture our fascination but unusual enough to actually surprise and satisfy us when the inevitable explanation rolls around? It’s a classic dilemma: a mystery is an irresistible means to energize any tale, but we’ve seen so many mysteries that picking out the possible solutions in almost any film is child’s play for a jaded filmgoer. An out-of-the-blue solution with no basis in what came before is frustrating and unfair, but a well-supported solution is instantly predictable and dull. Attempts to deal with this problem have resulted in solutions which run the gamut from disastrously idiotic (THE MAZE), to despondently inevitable (THE OTHERS), to the intentionally vague (ZODIAC), to the infuriatingly movie-negating (SHUTTER ISLAND), to the downright unimportant (VERTIGO).

Sometimes the movie is still real good, obviously, but the solution is still something of a disappointment. I think I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen the a satisfying solution pulled off successfully. But I guess I’ll have to get some toes involved soon, because fuck me if HE NEVER DIED isn’t a superbly engrossing mystery with a solution every bit as bold and startling as the journey by which we get there. I should have known we were in for a good one, because while DARK WAS THE NIGHT had an awesome title font and then proceeded to be one of the worst movies of the year, HE NEVER DIED starts with a proudly low-rent title font that makes it look like the credit sequence to an early 90’s TV show. It doesn’t give a fuck about that shit, cool fonts are beneath notice to this lumbering giant of badassness.

Before we talk about the plot, though, let’s take a moment and bask in the glory of the following sentence: This is the movie Henry Rollins was born to make. It’s been a well-established scientific fact that Rollins is history’s greatest man since back in his days as a Washington DC Haagen-Daaz assistant manager, and he’s been in a steady stream of movies since the end of his tour of duty as singer for the seminal hardcore band Black Flag. Everyone has always known he was a powerful elemental force, but up til now no one had yet figured out how to actually harness that power effectively, like solar wind or Ryan Reynolds. He’s been a cyberpunk in JOHNNY MNEMONIC, a prison guard in LOST HIGHWAY, a mob bodyguard in HEAT, a 4-wheeler driver in JACKASS 2, a badass survivalist in WRONG TURN 2, and also a real-life detective in WEST OF MEMPHIS. But aside from helping to give Steve-O a painful tattoo and getting the West Memphis Three released from prison, his film roles up til now hadn’t quite managed to generate the kind of potency he is obviously capable of.

That changes here. As Jack, the mononymic hermit living in a cheap apartment and limiting any contact with humanity to its barest minimum, Rollins is finally able to capitalize on his unique superpower for stoic intensity. Jack is a man of routine; he pays his rent wordlessly in cash, he eats a strictly vegetarian diet at a local diner, he plays marathon bingo at a small-stakes local church, and spends as much time as possible sleeping. But he’s also a man with secrets; he has a steamer chest filled with very, very old antiques. He doesn’t drink alcohol, but the way he looks at a glass of beer, you know this hasn’t always been the case. And his dreams --which we hear, but don’t see-- are filled with screaming and violence. Oh, and also, maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but he’s also bribing a med student (Booboo Stewart --I’ll give you a second to adjust to a world where someone has that name-- from X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST) to supply him with bags of human blood. Hmmm.

His simple rhythm is disrupted by two forces which insert themselves into his life. The first is the appearance of his teenage daughter (Jordan Todosey, Degrassi: The Next Generation), who he’s never met, but who is very insistent on spending a little time non-consensually bonding. Jack is irascible and solitary and does not take well to his new housemate, but doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to get rid of the persistent young woman. Meanwhile, he has another problem: for reasons unknown to him, he keeps getting stalked and hassled by gangsters and has to beat the tar out of them and not give a fuck. In fact, he seems about equally annoyed by both unwanted presences in his life.

Not giving a fuck is kinda his thing. He has very, very little inclination to acknowledge or respond to any other human being, even the cute diner waitress (Kate Greenhouse, minor parts in TV shows and stuff, although she did star in the interesting-sounding THE DARK HOURS) who might as well be flirting with his eggplant parmesan for all the response she’s getting. With great effort, he’s capable of holding a basic conversation and only seeming a little off, but his interest in picking up on social cues or meeting other peoples’ expectations of him is virtually nil. Only when the situations escalates enough to disrupt his routine does he reluctantly start to get more actively involved in dealing with shit.

That doesn’t sound like a a lot of fun, but half the charm in the movie is watching Rollins’ annoyance and bafflement that he has to deal with any of this. Every answer someone drags out of him seems to require intense concentration, and his demeanor suggests he’s constantly calculating whether it’ll take less effort to continue to unconvincingly fake a conversation, or just punch the person in the face until they go away. It’s a great weirdo role, as perfectly suited for Rollins as THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH was for David Bowie, in the sense that the character is in a lot of ways a perfect summation of both the actor’s public persona and personal quirks. Rollins is already an uncomfortably intense, awkward obsessive, and those qualities are amplified here to terrific comic effect, but also a subtle pathos. For all his quirky charm, Jack is totally isolated and disaffected, lost in the endless monotonous doldrums of a life with no purpose. He’s been doing it so long that he barely remembers how to even pretend to be human, if, indeed, he ever knew.

Who, exactly, Jack is, and what has made him this way, are the movie’s defining questions, and writer/director Jason Krawczyk (little-seen crime thriller THE BRIEFCASE in 2011 and a couple shorts) portions out little hints at the perfect pace to keep us hungry but never frustrated. But there’s more going on here, too; just why is it that these gangsters are so keen to pick a fight with him? And who’s the mysterious, sinister figure that only he can see? What’s up with the mysterious scars on his back, which his daughter seems to possess as well? Strangeness on top of strangeness. Not all of these questions will be explicitly answered, but the movie provides exactly enough explanation that you can draw your own conclusions -- a setup which is usually the perfect cocktail of preserving some degree of curiosity while still providing the satisfaction of some revelation. In this case, though, it helps that we do get one definitive answer, and it’s a fuckin’ doozy. Whatever it is you think is going on here, I can pretty much guarantee it’s not quite what you imagine.

But while the mystery provides structure, the film is equally a strange character piece, an awkward comedy/drama about whether or not Jack’s going to be able to find his way out of the comfortable hole he’s dug for himself and reclaim some of his humanity. Several people in his life -- the medical student who wants to be his friend, his daughter who wants to know her father, the waitress at the diner who just wants some stable companionship -- are reaching into his den, trying to pull him out, and he seems both reticent and somewhat torn, like he knows better than this, but a part of him still can’t seem to entirely reject the outside world.

Bingo!

Where this all goes is just as unexpected as any of the movie’s surprises, but I want to talk a little about it so I have no choice here but to get into SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER territory. Seriously, you’ll be a lot happier knowing as little as possible going in, and since there’s really not any chance of you seeing this thing for awhile (I got to see a very early screening at the AFI Spooky Movie festival this year, again, my life is dope and I do dope shit) I really urge you to refrain from reading any further til you do. So right now, this is for me more than anyone else.

SPOILERS AHOY. OK, so the most interesting thing about this whole movie is that it doesn’t quite go where you expect in terms of the drama, let alone mystery. When gangsters kidnap Jack’s daughter and tell him they’ll kill her at midnight unless he shows up, you figure it’s time for him to cowboy up, kick some ass, and reclaim his humanity. But he just doesn’t seem to care. Or at least, not enough to do anything about it. He seems a little sad, but he’s philosophical about it. You can’t help but sort of hate him for being so selfish. His indifference starts to make more sense when we learn a little more about him, though. Even in this spoiler section, I’m not going to explain exactly what his deal is, but suffice to say, you’ve already guessed from the title and a few hints early on that he’s some kind of immortal, supernatural entity. What differentiates HE NEVER DIES from basically any other movie I’ve ever seen is just how old he is. Jack, it seems, is old enough to consider Louise from SPRING a total n00b to be pwned. I mean, how could you realistically ask him to care about his daughter when he’s seen whole generations, whole civilizations --everyone he’s ever met and cared about even a little-- wither and die? Just like SPRING, actually, HE NEVER DIES finds a central conflict in whether or not Jack will be able to give in and allow himself to reconnect to life anyway, even if he knows it will end in heartbreak, even if maybe he can’t bear to see yet another love come into his life, only to wither and die while he persists, adding one more painful memory to those dreams he keeps having.

MORE SPOILERS AHOY! The difference between this one and SPRING, though, is that Jack comes to the opposite conclusion; or, rather, has the opposite result thrust on him. When the adorable waitress who’s been trying to reach him the whole movie finally hears his whole story, she’s not relieved, she’s horrified. This will obviously be the end of their relationship. Living forever inevitably isolates you, turns you into a monster who can’t possibly care about people anymore. Living forever means you eventually do everything, including all the worst things that people are capable of. “I’ve killed 9-year old kids for no reason at all,” he says, matter-of-factly. You expect a movie like this to end with some measure of understanding reached, but the gap between Jack and a normal human experience is just too great. He can’t bridge it, and he’s finally learned that painful lesson enough times that he doesn’t even try anymore. Hell, he probably learned it centuries ago. But cruelly, there’s still that tiny little human part of his brain that tugs on him, that makes him wish and wonder, even though he knows there’s no point to it. Makes him --completely against his will and his better judgment-- get involved anyway, occasionally. But it’s to no avail. He’s not going to ever have a relationship with either of the women in his life who are mistakenly trying to crack his shell. He has to pay the waitress to help him once he finally decides he’s gonna make an effort to save his daughter. And when he finally understands why she’s been taken, it becomes obvious this is all his fault, blowback for a crime he committed years ago and probably hasn’t even thought about since. The end makes it clear that if there is, indeed, a lesson to be learned from his centuries of limbo, he certainly hasn’t learned it yet. And maybe there isn’t even a lesson at all, maybe this is simply the dispassionate sadism of a universe even older and more disconnected than he is. END SPOILERS, END SPOILERS.

Anyway, HE NEVER DIED is fuckin’ great. It wobbles only towards the very end, when it struggles a little to find a suitable climax for a man for whom nothing means very much. But its bold, darkly philosophical grace note at the end is --if delivered in a manner ever-so-slightly clumsy-- still more than enough to redeem everything. The film itself was obviously made on the cheap. More than just the font strongly evokes a no-budget 1990’s indie crime drama. It would have fit right in between THE MINUS MAN and A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (though it’s better than both) save for Rollins’ recent shock of bright white hair. The filmmaking appears to somehow be blissfully unaware that an entire generation of color-corrected filters, rabid avid editing, and gloomy realism in acting has interceded between 1995 and now. But in a way, that’s part of its charm; the unassuming, point-and-shoot style and very slightly affected acting serves the movie well. It establishes a strong baseline of the movie’s inner reality, which is something of a gritty fairy tale, but, blessedly, one with absolutely no tiresome modern meta pretensions.

If you would enjoy a film where a bingo-playing supernatural Henry Rollins reluctantly goes to war with some small-time gangsters, this gives you the best imaginable version of that. If you wouldn’t like that, there’s no apology here, no effort to be hip or disaffected or postmodern so they can later deny that they really meant any of this. Like Rollins himself, the movie is so earnest and direct in its approach that it’s both off-puttingly funny and kinda endearing -- but also plenty capable of prickly aggression when the occasion arises. HE NEVER DIES is not a movie which will ever have a legion of fans, but I think it has cult classic written all over it, and deserves about 6 DTV sequels, each cheaper and more ridiculous and heartfelt than the last. Which is why I’m super excited that apparently they’re planning a god-damn miniseries. I’m usually strictly a movie guy, I don’t go for these newfangled Television box things, but here’s a case where I’ll obviously have to make an exception. Who says old guys can’t keep up with the times every now and again?

Finally, a mystery with a truly satisfying solution.

By the way, I'm pretty sure they just slapped a normal picture of Henry Rollins over the wings from the cover of the Slash-produced NOTHING LEFT TO FEAR.

Have a look:

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: Blood. Bullets. Bingo. and It's Hard To Live When You Can't Die.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No.
• SEQUEL: First in what apparently may end up a mini-series!?
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: "Boo Boo Stewart" has been in both X-MEN and TWILIGHT franchises.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Rollins has done FEAST, WRONG TURN 2, and DEVIL'S TOMB. Does that count?
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Debatable.
• EVIL CULT: None.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Still pretty high, but hopefully once it hits wider release it'll find its audience.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: HE NEVER DIED should do a crossover with John Lydon's character from CORRUPT.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Borne out by the events of the movie.

ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A, although she'd definitely have been into this one.