Friday, October 7, 2016

31 Days of Halloween 2016: Deathgasm

2015, Jason Lei Howden (visual effects guy on The Hobbit) -- download

OK, it's agreed. New Zealand is the best at horror-comedy, especially when it has some splatter gore. Did it start with Peter Jackson and Braindead (Dead Alive) ? I doubt it, but it continues with the Deathgasm wherein a high school metal band that accidentally summons a demon while playing the notes on someone's evil sheet music. Taking a tune from The Evil Dead, the demons create zombie-like deadites that that kids have to put down to save their town, and the world.

The movie starts with the cliches, charmingly put together with great quips and nods to D&D. Now that Stranger Things did it, its the cool thing that all the kids are doing. Brodie is a metalhead, and yes metalheads and D&D go well together. As well as drawing penis demons in your school notebooks. Speaking of penises, where Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse did immature badly and embarrassingly (stretchy undead penis) this movie takes immature and embarrassing (finding his uncle's massive dildo collection) to a whole other, typical Kiwi level -- killing said undead uncle with the dildos. And not quickly; and not cleanly. And adding in chainsaws. They go waaaay past the good taste area into the next county.

And yet this is still a pretty damn good movie, as long as you accept the genre it is very solidly planted in. We actually root for the main character, to get the cheerleader, to defeat the evil and reverse the spells. The visual gags (music induced fantasies of standing on a mountain, nubile slaves girls at your feet, are gender non-specific, it seems) are great, the gore is over the top and they provide us with one lingering question -- in the age of MP3, how do you lend your music collection to the girl you want to impress? Apparently New Zealand still uses CDs.

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