It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
I’ve heard a lot about Rock N’ Roll Nightmare. My imagination built it up to be a very different movie. I thought it was going to be a horror version of Flash Gordon involving an 80s hair band descending into hell. I hoped for Gwar theatrics and scenery resembling a heavy metal album cover. Conversely, I’d never heard of the movie prior to the mid-2000s so I suspected a fledgling DVD distributor found an unseen piece of garbage and was attempting to push it as a cult classic in close-out stores and truck stops.
Both my positive and negative expectations were wrong, which is another reason I try to learn little about these movies before I actually watch them. Rock N’ Roll Nightmare is deserving of its newfound cult status even though I’m convinced Synapse Films marketed it as a cult classic long before the cult actually existed. If this movie really did have a cult following in the 90s, how is it possible the MST3K guys never featured it? (Apparently there’s a RiffTrax, but that came out after the Synapse release.)
A band drags their uninterested girlfriends out to an old farm, the barn of which has been converted into a recording studio. The caretaker tells the band’s manager that the barn-studio was previously used by Alice Cooper and, if my ears weren’t deceiving me, “Bob Stewart.” The last ten minutes of the flick are brilliantly unexpected, it’s as if the filmmakers threw their hands up and said, “Eh, fuck it. We were making that movie, but now we’re making this movie. So enjoy these flying squids and homemade pyrotechnics.”
The first half of the movie is so tame and wonderfully cheesy, the characters act more like a Christian youth group than a heavy metal band. The sex takes place entirely off camera… until suddenly it doesn’t. Because you were lured into thinking this was PG-rated content, an unexpected sex scene involving a flickering tongue-kiss is jarringly hilarious. Why they wouldn’t cut away before that happened, but take care to show almost none of the violence, is beyond comprehension.
If you’ve heard of Rock N’ Roll Nightmare at all, you probably heard about how awful it is. Sure, the “demons” in the film are little more than sock puppets. Not only is the acting atrocious (intentionally so, I’m sure), the audio is rarely in sync with the footage. But the movie was shot in seven days and, considering it was little more than a vanity project for its lead (a pretty interesting jack-of-all-trades according to Wikipedia), it’s way better than it has any right to be. It’s charming, funny, and endlessly entertaining.
I’ll admit it if no one else will: the music’s not bad at all. Cheesy, yes, but that’s what we all came for, isn’t it?
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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