Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Deathgasm
Label: Self-released
Release: year_month
Length: 1:26
Rating: 4/5
Something a bit different this time, not strictly music, but inseparably tied to metal all the same! Horror (on film) and metal have always gone hand in hand, ever since the early eighties and probably the best-known film to mash metal and horror together, Trick Or Treat (with Ozzy and Gene Simmons), plus Shock ‘Em Dead, The Gate and plenty of other mostly hit-and-miss attempts. But never before have cinema and metal worked together as effectively and convincingly as in the feature-length debut of New Zealand director Jason Lei Howden, Deathgasm.
Howden, who also wrote the script for Deathgasm and is a sworn metal fanatic (Emperor and Cannibal Corpse are among his favorite bands), was known as a visual effects wizard before his directing debut. He worked on big productions like Avengers, Prometheus and The Hobbit, but in Deathgasm he brought his love of metal and splatstick shenanigans to the big screen, led by Peter Jackson’s masterpieces like the cult classics Bad Taste and BrainDead, plus Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy.
The plot of Deathgasm is admittedly super clichéd – a bunch of metalheads discover the ancient sheet music for the Black Hymn by the cult band Hexan Sword, and when they play it above ground, they obviously unleash a demonic apocalypse. The characters seem clichéd at first too: metalheads as social outcasts, the obligatory school bullies and the hot blonde who becomes the object of desire for the main character Brodie, who has to move in with his religiously nuts uncle and aunt after his mom gets institutionalized. They obviously don’t get his devilish racket, his uncle even tries to baptize him in his sleep, and Brodie quickly finds an ally in Zakk, with a convincing bromance blossoming between them in no time. In a different setting, these black-and-white characters would come off as cheap, but here they only add to the film’s charm, since Howden levels them up by throwing them into a thoroughly metal environment. Brodie and Zakk blast a killer soundtrack with bands like Nunslaughter, Axeslasher, Midnight, Emperor, Elm Street and many others, their band shoots videos a la Immortal – Call of the Wintermoon, and Zakk teases Brodie for listening to Trivium.
Deathgasm holds up just as convincingly on the horror front. Despite a miserable budget, Howden managed to create a respectable tribute to classics like Evil Dead (an obvious hommage to Raimi’s camerawork) and BrainDead, while breathing some much-needed freshness into the genre. Blood, guts, dismemberment and everything that comes with them are handled from a comic perspective, and the special effects are downright excellent for a film this size, and you can tell Howden has tons of experience in the field. The actors do a very good job too. Milo Cawthorne as Brodie may not be Bruce Campbell, but by the end of the film he’s dealing with demons just as effectively as Ash, and the ways they go about it haven’t been this twisted and fun in a long time.
Since it’s a debut, Deathgasm suffers from a few minor problems: it loses the thread in places, the side characters are underused, with the cultists and the nerdy »sidekicks« leading the pack, and the script limps a little in spots too, but Howden can fix all of that in Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon, which has already been announced. Fuck yeah! Deathgasm is a glorious continuation of New Zealand’s tradition of black-humored grossness, whose torchbearers in recent years have been first and foremost Black Sheep and What We Do In the Shadows, and it’s sure to become the go-to Halloween menage-a-trois with BrainDead and Evil Dead (beer and pizza in hand, of course). Two severed thumbs up!
You can catch Deathgasm tomorrow, Friday, 3/25/2016, at Kino Dvor!
Production
Jason Lei Howden (director)
