Bad Meaning Good case study #6: 'Rock N Roll Nightmare'

Wednesday, November 18 2009

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

Bad Meaning Good case study #5:
'Rock N Roll Nightmare' (dir. John Fasano)

Summary:
'Rock N Roll Nightmare' (aka 'The Edge Of Hell') is a 1987 would-be star-making vehicle for one Canadian national treasure Jon-Mikl Thor and by God, is it ever one HELL of a bad movie. Thor plays the frontman for The Tritonz, an aspiring hair-metal/glam outfit taking up temporary residence in a rural Ontario farm house with the mind to turn it into a recording/rehearsal space, thereby allowing Thor the freedom to traverse the bottomless depths of his internal songwriting reservoir free from the temptations of big city excess. Upon arrival the band is met by all manner of hell-spawn oddities and what ensues is the stuff of by-the-numbers slasher fare, albeit on what could generously be described a limited budget. Not all is as it seems though and a final act twist reveals that what is actually taking place could indeed be part of a far greater struggle between the forces of good and evil at large.

Conflicting online reports quote the film's budget within the range of $50-100,000 dollars and it would appear that production value be damned, a woefully significant portion of that budget was spent on hair product alone. The movie is a tacky 80's hairdresser's wet dream and no human head is spared a hideously unflattering fate over the film's duration. The wardrobe stylists were likely allotted the remainder of that budget and promptly spent it on polka dot blouses, shiny silver blazers, metal-studded leather underwear and whatever other ghastly clothing abominations Thor deemed necessary to strike that perfect visual balance between professional wrestler and latent homosexual hair-rocker.

The film positively REEKS of being Thor's personal vanity project and functions as much as a mock demo for his gloriously over the top butt-rock songbook as it does any sort of actual story or coherent narrative. Between extended bouts of rocking, the band mostly spends it's time fucking and dying in that very order. Little else takes place at all. (Rest assured though, the boobs per minute ratio remains ridiculously high throughout.)

As the movie approaches its climax, Thor is brought to an impasse with the devil himself and what follows is a fight scene so mind-fuckingly inept in execution that it makes Ed Wood look like Peckinpah or 'Hard Boiled'-era John Woo by comparison. To think that the balance of good and evil or the very fate of mankind itself could possibly be determined by a standoff between an inert, rubber-starfish-flinging artificial demon and a hairy, muscle-bound, greased-up, poor man's Dee Snider... Well, needless to say what happens here is the stuff of shitty movie legend and I'd better not go into further detail and risk spoiling the visual riches therein. This is something that truly needs to be seen to be believed.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' is it?:
It's staggering to think that a film as artless and incompetent as 'Rock N Roll Nightmare' could have POSSIBLY cost more than $10-20,000, much less upwards of $50-100,000. However, what it lacks in economic efficiency it more than makes up for in good, old fashioned, enthusiastic DIY spirit. I don't think the word "amateur" even begins to describe what's going on here. Truthfully though, who gives a shit? When cost-cutting measures require demonic spirits and other assorted monsters to be replaced by sock puppets and inanimate rubber creatures, the fun is really only beginning...

And how about those villains? The baddies in this film are mostly rubber hand puppets and slimy, phallic, one-eyed penis-beasts. It's totally fucking bizarre and gnarly-all-over. We get a lot of Evil Dead-styled POV shots, presumably from the perspective of these creatures and a lot of scenes where love-making sessions are interrupted by demonic possessions and laughably harebrained kill sequences.

... And we haven't even touched on the overwhelming creep-out factor that Jon-Mikl Thor brings to the table. This dude exorcised a lifetime's worth of sexual frustration during the production of this movie by ensuring that the bare breast quotient remained bountiful and near-consant. He wrote groupies for his band into the story, he wrote topless scenes for all the female characters... Hell, he even wrote he and his female counterpart a brutally lengthy sex scene in the shower that lingers on his bare ass for a painfully long time before mercifully moving on (one of the only scenes in the movie that is not in any way amusing).

What else do we have? We have a woman being turned into a skeleton by spending about 20 seconds in an oven... We have the worst Australian accent ever committed to celluloid (which comes and goes seemingly at random)... We have shots that often linger for up to 5 seconds past their comfortable conclusion... We have lost metal classics like "We Live To Rock" and "Energy" (What, you mean you don't remember those?)... We have a near constant stream of unforced continuity errors and production flaws... What we have is the makings of a bona fide 'Bad Meaning Good' classic, that's what we have.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
8.7

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

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