Kiwigasm

Deathgasm (2015) is another entry into our metal horror comedy festival. This entry comes from New Zealand, and is pretty crazy.

It stars Milo Cawthorne as Brodie, a high school metalhead who gets sent to a small town to live with his Christian aunt and uncle while his mother is in the hospital (meth problem). They are not very tolerant of his lifestyle, and his cousin is a jock bully. He tries to rescue a nerd from his cousin and crew, and gets introduced to another nerd and the concept of Dungeons and Dragons - which he doesn’t care for. Then he meets Zakk (James Blake) in the local record store.

Zakk is another metalhead, and a real bad boy - he drinks, smokes pot, and plays outrageous pranks. Along with the two nerds, they form a band that Zakk insists must be called Deathgasm. Also, it looks like the cutest girl in school (and his jock cousin’s girl), Medina (Kimberly Crossman), is interested in him. So now he’s starting to have fun.

One of Zakk’s pranks is to sneak into a “deserted” house where he thinks a famous musician is hiding out. They find him, but so does a strange cult. So the musician gives them a record and they run, before the cult gets them. The record turns out to be Rick Astley (Rick rolled!), but there is also some paper with an ancient musical melody written on it. When they play it, it has a weird effect on them - and the neighborhood. Could it be - the Devil’s Music? (SPOILER - yes.)

Soon Brodie is pissed off enough at everybody that he is willing to play this Satanic Hymn to gain great power. He doesn’t, though. He just makes everyone else possessed by demons.

There’s a lot to love about this movie. It has great low-budget gross-out special effects, including a long fight between Brodie’s demonic aunt and uncle, and Brodie and Zakk, armed with a collection of dildos and vibrators. Then there’s the teen character study, with Zakk as the fun friend who turns out to be a totally selfish jerk who will try to steal your girl and lie to your face about it. Then there’s the metal sound track, which is pretty righteous. And it’s all done in a devil-may-care (heh) indie style with notebook doodle title cards, crazy editing and fourth wall breaking.

Also, the Brodie/Medina/Zakk triangle made me notice that Jennifer’s Body is a rock-horror-comedy, because of a similar scene. Cool.