White Elephant Blogathon

Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare

This was my draw in the 4th Annual White Elephant Blogathon. I'll supply the link to all the fun as soon as I dredge it up.

I am a serious knucklehead when it comes to Cult Classics. If one is showing nearby, I tend to back out at the last second. I never think to queue on up. I am squeamish about violence, and indifferent to gore. But within the genre, I am partial to movies that were made in earnest. When I can believe that the finished product was something its makers were genuinely proud of, I am on board.

This 1987 is a paradigm example. Written, produced, and starring the Canadian fringe heavy metal musician/entertainer/bodybuilder Jon Mikl Thor. A clip of his national tv debut, on the Merv Griffin Show (oh, Merv) shows a younger, sleeker, pornier version of the Thor in Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare. He's puffier here, a little bloated. But there's something unexpectedly winning about his screen presence -- he's an innocent, and a sweetness comes through.

The plot takes Thor's heavy metal rock band, Triton, and their big-haired wives and girlfriends to a remote Ontario farmhouse, the scene of a long-ago brutal domestic tragedy, which we see in a promisingly effective pre-credit sequence. (The movie often looks great, with good use made of the lonely Canadian dusk.). One of the band-members wears dark sunglasses and is Australian. There is either one other band member or two that look and act so much alike that I never sorted them out. One by one they're picked off, non-scarily, by --- something supernatural. The movie establishes no laws, routine, or logic for the slaughter, and the connection to the old farmhouse family is baffling. In a few cases, a character you thought was dead doesn't seem to be. And at least one character returns from his mangling with improved skills in bed. Still, you never lose confidence that Jon Mikl Thor understands the plot and its logics.

The denouement is unexpected and legendarily goofy, with memorable special effects creatures.

Another of Thor's movies, Zombie Nightmare, got the MSTK3 treatment.