Deathgasm is the demonic, heavy mental
horror film you didn’t even know you wanted. Okay, I knew this is exactly what
I wanted, but the likes of Wild Zero, Black
Roses, and Rock and Roll Nightmare are all
personal favorites. It’s like this movie was made specifically for me, which
was quite nice of writer/director Jason Lei Howden. When you hear a title like
Deathgasm, odds are it conjures up some particular, rather
vivid imagery, and that’s exactly the movie you see on screen. And it’s fucking
awesome: funny, gore-soaked, and actually a bit touching.
After his mother is institutionalized for trying to blow a
bunch of truckers, metal head Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is forced to go live with
his uptight religious aunt and uncle, and their dickhead son, in a small New
Zealand town. He falls in with some D&D nerds, pines after Medina (Kimberly
Crossman), the out-of-his-league hottest girl in school, and deals with the
constant stares from the rural yokels. The only thing that makes life in this
shit pile even remotely bearable is Zakk (James Blake). The only other metal
head in town, Zakk is a wild card who leaves trail of wreckage and teen pregnancy
in his wake. The obvious choice is, of course, to start a band, but problems
arise when they play a song so evil it actually calls forth the King of Demons
to besiege their crappy little burg.
Deathgasm is like if one of those heavy
metal scare films from the 1980s actually happened, which is something I’ve
been waiting for as long as I can remember. How many of us grew up in a world
where heavy metal seemed legitimately scary, rebellious, and dangerous? The
idea of Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest being evil and leading the youth of
America astray or causing the end of days is so quaint and adorable now.
As the demon army invades, Howden, who has done visual
effects work on films like The Avengers,
Prometheus, and The Great Gatsby,
channels his inner Peter Jackson. We’re talking about Dead
Alive/Bad Taste Peter Jackson (one character even
wears a Bad Taste T-shirt), not bloated, boring,
Hobbit Peter Jackson. There are beheadings, possessions,
spines being ripped out, and geysers of blood covering the entire damn town in
sticky red goo. It’s especially fun to watch the prissy, put together Medina go
off the rails and become metal-worshipping, axe-brandishing badass demon
slayer.
But there’s more than just horror going on in
Deathgasm, which is a part of the fun. The shitty small town
blues are familiar, but relatable, and show up just enough to drive home how
terrible this place is. Cawthorne and Blake have a solid chemistry and their
brothers-in-metal shtick plays for both laughs and as an authentic survival
mechanism. Their relationship even adds a few tugs at the heartstrings and some
bro-betrayal. As it descends into full-blown mayhem, the comedy is foul and
raunchy and funny, not to mention occasionally clever.
While all of that is nice, and makes
Deathgasm a more well rounded movie than you may initially
expect, it’s all about loud-ass music, spraying streams of blood, and battling
demons. All the rest serves to dress up those elements, but at the end of the
day, Deathgasm is about getting awesome, and it most
certainly does. [Grade: A]
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