REVIEW: Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare (1987)

Do you ever wish the 80s would come back? Well, this will probably make you reconsider.

Director: John Fasano

Starring: John Mikl-Thor VS THE DEVIL!!!

IMDb

Yes, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, the best movie ever to feature John Mikl Thor, the Canadian rock/metal performer who got almost no exposure but has kept on releasing material anyway in the underground, refusing to buckle to trends. Or, apparently, to indecent exposure laws. The film is filled with music that’s about what you’d expect from looking at this thing’s cover. That’s right, it’s gangster rap with techno elements.

We start off our movie with a bunch of quick shots of a family in an idyllic suburban home, reenacting scenes from Troll 2. Don’t believe me? Check out the little kid’s impression of the famous “Oh my GOOOOOOOOOD!” scene:

Props for the flaming, melted skeleton popping out of the oven though. I didn’t expect that at all. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t clean your oven for too long. You just miss things.

It's like if you skinned a Gremlin alive and then stuck it in an oven...what kind of monster could be so cruel?

Then after that we get the true identity of the killer; the tracking shot from the beginning of Halloween:

Of course, it was Michael Myers all along! I never thought John Mikl Thor would go so low as to steal the whole killer from a separate film though. And also, I have to say this whole ‘show some tracking shot footage and then cut to black for a title credit every few seconds’ thing is a bit stupid. It’s kind of like watching a film editor have a seizure while trying to do his job.

And finally we get our title screen, which of course will showcase the brilliant name of this movie for all to---

What? The Edge of Hell? What the hell is that? Pfft. Well, my trust in this movie has gone majorly down as of right now…if I can’t even trust a film to get its title right, then what the hell can I trust it to do? It’s almost like movie studios can mess with a movie or something…feh.

Next we see a bunch of people whose fashion will never go out of style.

Truly they are hip and attuned to the coming storm of the future.

So, apparently, these people are here to stay in this cabin and write rock songs for a week, or some shit like that. I dunno. It’s basically a ripoff of the 2010 movie Don’t Go in the Woods, and how dare this 1987 movie rip off that 2010 movie! The gall of some people. The characters are all kind of interchangeable. The women all sport haircuts that would be better suited to characters in blacksploitation films and wear color-coded dresses – you still won’t be able to tell them apart though.

The guys pretty much just talk about sex a lot. One of them has a fake sounding Australian accent and he literally just sounds like a character off of Sesame Street. Not to mention the acting is about as credible as emails from Nigerian princesses asking you for thousands of dollars so she can win a beauty pageant or something. I mean really, I expect professional acting quality from a movie like this. How long did it take to make? IMDb says seven days. Seven days is more than long enough time to hire good actors, Thor!

Ahem…I’m sorry; I seem to have been taken over by the vengeful spirit of a modern Internet-age nitpicker with a stick up his ass. Excuse that.

I also love how one of the couples on this trip is on their fucking honeymoon. Yes, that’s right, they used their honeymoon to come to this cabin with a bunch of smelly 80s rockers and write music. Are you shitting me? Girls, maybe I’m just not in tune here, but…wouldn’t this be the sort of thing that sends you running to divorce court? I mean, it’s just not that good of a sign for the marriage. All I can see as the future for this marriage is lots and lots of cocaine and marriage counseling. But hey, I’m not an expert.

Then we get one of the movie’s favorite things – a scene of the band playing a song while Thor wears a jacket that looks like he skinned a disco ball alive. The song is actually pretty good; I’ll be honest. I hope they don’t remake this movie in the 2010s. Then it would just have a bunch of Myspace-era alt rock trying to rip off Neutral Milk Hotel or At the Drive In as the soundtrack.

Be honest, you wish your band could look this awesome while playing.

So while you’re busy wondering how a band practice jam turned into basically a music video for one of Thor’s new songs at the time, the band members decide to partake in some recreational activities. Especially this nerdy guy, who has a hot chick approach him on the roof and then denies her sex. I think this is basically a Litmus test for how straight you are.

Ew, cooties!

But it’s OK, because the woman is not actually a woman at all, but a rejected Troll 2 claymation monster!

You know the old saying…rock music gets you chicks. And horribly deformed and insane monsters.

So then we see that fake-Australian accented guy having loud, irritating sex with his girlfriend, never shutting up throughout the whole thing. Then he gets up and tells her he has to go “drain the dragon,” because yeah, that’s really a metaphor that needed to exist, right? He goes to the bathroom and then sees a hot chick waiting for him in the doorway. But then it turns out it’s just a rotting, decaying green zombie. I’ve made the same mistake lots of times.

Fuck this character anyway. He got what he deserved!

Meanwhile the couple on their honeymoon is having fun listening to everyone else have sex all around them. And by fun I mean the girl is probably regretting her decision to marry this bunghole. He even makes a joke about how they could’ve been somewhere romantic and exciting like Hawaii or the Keys! He’s admitting that this whole thing was an asinine excuse for a honeymoon! Somehow that doesn’t make it okay. It’s like an alcoholic going “Yeah, I sure do drink a lot!” Doesn’t really make it any more excusable or better.

Luckily for me, the movie has another surprise right up its sleeve – the one single girl and single guy in the group meet up when the girl comes in and says she couldn’t sleep and wants to “talk.” Heh. Yeah right. “Talk” in a movie where characters have sex more often than they exchange dialogue? Please. You’re being so obvious about a cliché porno scene set-up that even a blind person could see it bright as day – hell, in glowering neon letters even! C’mon movie. Stop jerking us around and get to it already! Just have them fuck like we know they…

Wait a minute. What’s going on?

"Aw man, I can't even get sex when a woman walks into my room wearing no pants? I must really be hopeless."

They’re really just talking and all she wants to do is sit on his bed with him and have a conversation? Huh. I did not see that coming. Good play, movie…

Next scene we get Thor and his girlfriend sleeping in what looks like a coffin together (which is never explained or even brought up, so I guess it must be the norm). Apparently the book he’s reading is really good, because every time she says something, he replies with “what was that, honey?” He doesn’t even miss a beat. She says something and then he just responds with that right after. She gets annoyed that he isn’t listening. Personally I think this is a subtle commentary on the repercussions of playing and hearing too much loud rock music. He isn’t an insensitive douche. He just has a huge hearing loss!

Also I’m not sure Thor can read, so I don’t really know what they’re playing at here.

The next day after another music video, the possessed Australian guy says in a creepy voice that he wants to take his girlfriend on a walk by the lake. The way he says it, it’s more like a child molester inviting little Timmy into his van. Eugh, who would fall for that? Apparently these girls’ huge hair is cutting off the flow of blood to their brains, because the chick just goes along with it without questioning a thing. She immediately strips her top off and, not to be outmatched, he rips himself apart from the inside out!

Well, it’s more like a demon hand thingy that comes out, but eh, who’s nitpicking? Its first move is to grab her boob. So it can’t really be that far off from the human part of him. I guess it kills her, but the movie doesn’t really go into too much explicitness about it or anything.

After that we get a scene with some fans of the band coming to the house. The nerdy guy – who is really the demon at this point, as we haven’t seen him in a while and the last we did see was him getting killed – lets them in and then demands they all take off their clothes so he can judge if they look good enough to be groupies. They’re really offended at it and end up leaving. I love how the nerdy guy just lets them go. What kind of evil villain in this guy? He just shouts at them to strip and then lets them go when they get mad? He doesn’t even try that hard! What on Earth was the point? I bet these girls didn’t want to do anything sleazy at all. They just wanted to have a sophisticated conversation on the merits of literature with the band. But alas, sexism wins again…

"What do you MEAN we get objectified when we act like groupies of a band and go to their house in the middle of the night? WE ARE RESPECTABLE FEMINISTS!"

Next scene we get two of the other morons having sex when they hear a little kid run by. I’m surprised that isn’t one of their fetishes. They assume he just let himself in off the street, because you know that happens all the time. They go and search for him, and figure out the answer to the mystery: he’s not a little boy at all. Just a character from Where the Wild Things Are.

Meanwhile, Thor and his girlfriend take a shower. I’ll give you a prize if you can tell who’s the man and who’s the woman in this picture:

Eventually, I guess it just comes down to Thor and his girlfriend, as she gets taken over by the demon too and confronts him as he’s sitting in the shed trying to write songs. We get some legitimately scary bits when the girlfriend comes downstairs and her voice starts changing into something demonic as the world fades away behind her.

That’s pretty goddamned cool, and really makes me think this could have been a much better film if they had just stopped right there and not used special effects – just have the devil be something intangible and unseen, you know?

But of course that would be antithetical to the movie’s goal of being as stupid as possible. So instead we get this, which looks like something ET shat out whilst partaking in PCP:

We also get a couple of the devil’s minions, which look like phallic symbols crafted by Jim Hanson if he was starring in The Exorcist. I seriously just don’t get some of this imagery. I mean what the fuck is THIS supposed to be?

If someone doesn’t make THAT into a meme and slap some goofy self-aware captions beneath it, I’m calling BS on the entire internet!

So I guess the story here is that the devil toots his own horn a bit, expecting Thor not to know who he is, but gets a nasty shock when Thor starts rattling off a list of the devil’s names and proves he knows the devil probably better than anyone. Even the devil himself.

An even bigger realization is that none of the other characters have really existed in the movie at all. They’ve just been part of Thor’s imagination this whole time! Apparently he was just trying to lure the devil to come to him by pretending to be in a shitty slasher horror film and thus creating characters that would fit in that world. Well, I’ll give the movie that: I didn’t expect this at all. And what is the devil’s first move? To throw rubber starfish at him of course!

I don't get it either. I guess starfish was in the movie's budget, and anything that actually looked cool or made sense was not in the movie's budget. Does the devil just command all starfish? Does Patrick from Spongebob answer to a darker master?

But it’s okay, because Thor has the magical power of transforming into a male stripper!

Seriously movie - this face...I can't even...I just...okay, I give up.

They wrestle a bit. The only thing missing from this whole thing is a crowd of adoring fans and a pole dancing sequence – then it’d be just about perfect. The devil eventually just gives up and disappears in a poof of smoke. What a whiny little coward. So I guess Thor wins and can then go back to writing music that sounds like distilled 1980s in a can. What a happy ending. And really, no one actually died in the movie, so you can rest peacefully now.

So that was Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare – aren’t you glad you know this exists now? It’s a marvel. It’s completely bat shit insane and makes no sense, but it’s a marvel. It’s so cheesy and ridiculous, but it also has a real genuine passion behind it that I really like. I can get behind the surreal atmosphere, and while a lot of the scenes drag on a bit too long, there are some very cool shots here – all the ones of the blue-tinted house at night with the wind blowing are pretty damn chilling. The characters and dialogue are all awful, but then, I guess that was on purpose, seeing as Thor reveals he just made everyone up to trick the Devil into thinking he was in a horror film. That’s…almost clever.

So yeah, I like this one. It’s stupid and half-insane, but it has a real idea behind it and goes all the way with it. I can respect that. Plus, we all know what my REAL rock ‘n’ roll nightmare is…

Eugh. Just watch Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare instead.

Pictures copyright of their original owners; I own none of them!

REVIEW: Rock n' Roll Frankenstein (1999)

This is it, people – rock bottom. This is the worst out there. I really challenge you to find something worse than this, something more tasteless and ridiculous. Even the premise of the film doesn’t even sound real: A mad scientist creates a monster out of parts of dead rock and roll musicians, but puts a gay man’s penis on him and so the monster is confused about his sexuality – a plot point that takes up most of the film’s runtime. That sounds like some kind of horrendous satire of the shit I usually review. Am I really going through with this? Have I really sunk this low?

I mean really. I am currently delaying finishing this review just so I don’t have to go through the movie again to take the pictures for it. Even if I mute the sound like I usually do, just seeing clips of this movie again will send me into some kind of horrid comatose state of worthlessness and irrelevancy. But I guess that doesn’t matter, seeing as by the time I put this on my blog, it will already have the pictures on it. CRAZY TIME TRAVEL TWIST! Ooh, burn! What am I doing now? I dunno. I really have no point anymore if this is the kind of slop I’ve relegated myself to reviewing these days. Ha ha ha. I’ve really let myself go…let’s just see if we can get through this without me killing myself or someone else.

Director: Brian O'Hara

Starring: Liberace's Dick

IMDb

You know how some movies start off cleverly and with the proper amount of build up to suck you into the story? Well this one just starts off with a fat, loud record executive arguing with some has been rockstar that looks like a rejected member of Motley Crue by way of a washed up Def Leppard member, saying he doesn’t want to take the exec’s crap any longer. We don't know either character and have no reason to care, so it's safe to say starting off in media res may not have been the brightest idea for a movie like this...but hey, a bright idea in THIS movie? Ha! What a laugh.

After he leaves, the record executive throws his fists in the air and proclaims that he will never get f*cked with again, and the film editors apparently thought it was so good of a line that they multi-track it three times over with a delayed echo effect, like something a horrendous horror-comedy trying too hard to be funny would do. Oh, wait...

Yeah, try eating a few less Big Macs per day there, bucko. And get some goddamn acting classes while you're at it.

Then we’re introduced to our other main character Frankie, who talks to a rabid weasel with cartoon blood red eyes all day while tinkering in his lab. Will this extremely insane abomination of nature and human decency be explained? No, so don't even bother. We've got plenty of other, stranger things to marvel at in this film!

You know, it is just amazing to me how this movie is able to overlook this. The film treats it like it's nothing just as the characters do. That's a big part of why this doesn't work; because nothing is given any kind of wonder or mystique like in better horror comedies like Re-Animator or Brain Dead. Here it's all just a big pile of 'meh,' with a side of 'bleh.' There is never any sense of imagination or creativity to this - just the lowest form of pandering imaginable. Sickening.

It turns out he’s related to the angry record executive, whose name is Bernie, and who wants him to build a Frankenstein out of dead rock star body parts to make the new big music sensation and get really rich. Yes, because when one musician leaves your label, the best solution is clearly to go and make an abomination of nature and defile the graves of dead people to scavenge their body parts…and also, I love how nonchalant everyone treats this idea in the movie, like it’s just every day shit to them. “We’re going to make a freak of nature that nobody in the whole world has ever really accomplished? Meh.”

So yeah, Bernie has his stoner buddy, Iggy, and a few of his friends, go out and steal body parts from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Elvis Presley, among many others. They even start to make news headlines. Are you seriously telling me these bumbling stoners could ever get that much notoriety and not get caught? Give me a break.

Yup that's right, newspapers and cops all around the friggin' WORLD baffled by a pair of loser stoners! Hyuk hyuk! Why do I even bother?

But a problem does come when they have to get a penis for this rock n’ roll Frankenstein. Bernie says they need Jim Morrison’s, and Frankie says there’s some collector guy in the US who collects dead penises from famous musicians for some reason, so that’s where they go! You know, the most normal, non-weird plot element ever made…how did this even get written at all? Was there ever a need for a movie with a main plot point of ‘stealing the deceased Jim Morrison’s penis’? I really don’t think there was!

Anyway, they end up dropping Morrison’s penis into acid somehow, because they’re morons I guess. So instead they steal the penis of Liberace and pass it off as Morrison’s! And brace yourselves: the joke that goes along with this is really, really, REALLY awful!

"My wide eyed innocence will carry me through this movie way too far. I'm so oblivious and likable..."

So in a feat of incredible holy-shit Godlike science, Frankie creates a monster out of the parts of Elvis, Jimi Hendrix and Liberace that can walk, talk and function like a real human being in a few days or something. Nobody even bats an eye at this, but I guess that can be explained by the fact that most of the characters are stoned out of their minds, and the record executive guy has no soul at all. He just wants to control the monster and have him make money on stage for him, nothing else matters at all. I love one dimensional characters as much as any bad movie reviewer, but this seriously crosses the line into ZERO DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS.

So yeah, they call the monster “The King,” like Elvis, ha ha ha, whatever…and at first he’s just confused and stumbles around like a cobble of disorganized body parts. So of course the big bad richy-rich record executive douche just proclaims the experiment a failure! Yes…the miraculous, once in a lifetime scientific godsend that is CREATING A BRAND NEW HUMAN BEING is a failure, unless it can make fatboy Danny Devito-wannabe some more cash! Did anyone involved in this possess ANY KIND OF LOGICAL THOUGHT? It’s seriously baffling to me how these characters think. I know money corrupts, but…but honestly, THIS MUCH? I don’t buy it.

I’m not even kidding: the rest of the movie is pretty much just “The King” questioning his sexuality, as the Liberace penis that he was given makes him gay now. So we get endless tired and ridiculously unfunny scenes of him literally talking to his dick, which speaks in an annoyingly high pitched, nasally voice that sounds like the kind of jokey voice you’d give someone you dislike when telling a story about them. It’s the movie equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, and you will want to kill yourself after each one.

I mean, I don’t even get it – Liberace really merited this much flogging? Why? Did they just randomly pick a dead, ambiguously-gay celebrity to rag on for no reason? It really does go beyond humor and into ‘mean spirited’ a lot of the time, and there isn’t any cleverness or subtlety to the jokes. Not that I was expecting that, but still, at least SOMETHING beyond this low-brow crap would have made it bearable at the very least! Something to distract me from this movie’s constant assault on every sense I have! Yes, even smell and taste. The movie somehow offends my smell and taste as well somehow.

But who cares about stuff like THAT when we have scenes of “The King” eating gerbils’ heads! I think that was just the Ozzy Osbourne portion of him coming out though…and when he tries to have sex with women, silly things like this happen:

"I just killed a hooker because I'm gay and it's your fault!"...do I even need to say anything? Nope, didn't think so.

Oh, please…killing hookers is just another integral part of being a real rock star. That’s not shocking at all.

But scenes like that one bring out one of the movie’s other main problems, the amount of time dedicated to the subplot about him being gay. If it were just a minor thing with a few minutes at a time devoted to it, it’d be fine. But this…is literally all the rest of the movie is! Just scenes of him bitching about being gay. The crazy record exec Danny DeVito knock-off finds out and starts mouthing off horrible homophobic swear words. Dingleberry? Check. Fudgepacker? Check. Faggot? Checkity check check. If you didn’t like this character before, oh ho boy…aren’t you just endeared to him now?

You could probably start a countdown of all the insults he uses in this movie and you’d get something that amounts to more than the budget for the entire film. And hell, I know you’d probably get at least half the script from those words. Way to expand our vocabulary, Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein!

The true spirit of the film, however, comes out when “The King” goes to a church in the middle of the night to the confessional. I especially love how he says that he’s been having unnatural urges and homosexual thoughts BEFORE saying he murdered two people plus a bunch of small animals…and then right after that, we see the priest is a gay pedophile himself, because I guess the director was surrounding himself with those like him.

Any movie that has a sodomizing scene via a large statue of Christ is at least trying, but it’s balanced out by the intense sense of unpleasantness and pandering this movie has, like getting a laugh would be the holy grail of cinematic achievements – only the film is marketed solely towards bottom dwelling sewer rats and pedophilic serial killers, and no one else would ever find anything in it funny…

Then Frankie the scientist finally decides to tell the world about his amazing creation and get famous for it…what he SHOULD have done in the first place! His logic is rewarded by death:

The amount of not caring from this scene is just astounding to me really. Yes, I'm very invested in the movie about a Frankenstein's monster that looks like Elvis with a gay split personality in his penis...right...

“The King” goes into a major rock star depression and puts ice over his crotch, which mostly serves to make him look even more ridiculous. Somehow, I don’t really remember or care how, he ends up squashing record executive’s head with a horrible claymation effect that even Nightmare on Elm Street 5 would laugh at, and that movie was ten years older than this shit:

What, is his head a grapefruit?

Then in some warehouse he ends up amputating his own penis (which looks like a giant green pickle) with a big hook, and then he instantly dies, just like the movie instantly dies, with a soundtrack of somber funeral march music…oh, shut up Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein.

I…I just have nothing to say about this. It’s not even so bad because it’s offensive to homosexuals – no one would ever take this seriously enough to actually be offended in THAT respect – it’s bad because it’s so tasteless in its execution and humor that you literally feel yourself getting older as you sit there watching it. It’s such a groan-worthy, eye rolling experience of a film, and literally nothing is gained from it. The "ideas," what little there are, are painful like a nail-gun to the skull, the acting sucks, the production value is barely existent at all and overall, I think it’s the worst thing ever created by humans. Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein, YOU ARE THE WORST OF HUMANITY!

The images in this review are not my own, nor would any sane person ever want to own them. But for the sake of completion, they are copyright of their original owners - God bless their poor souls.