DEATHGASM (2015) - MOVIE REVIEW

For everyone already inclined to see a heavy-metal-themed New Zealand horror-comedy called Deathgasm, here’s some good news: The movie is exactly what it promises to be. 

Plot: After his meth-addict mum is sent to a mental asylum, teenage metalhead Brodie  moves to the suburban town of Greypoint to live with his bible-bashing Uncle Albert, Aunt Mary, and obnoxious cousin David. There he soon befriends role playing game-nerds Dion and Giles and another metalhead Zakk (James Blake), with whom he forms a band, Deathgasm. When the guys chance upon and perform a song written by Satanic metal star Ricky Daggers, they unwittingly unleash a plague of demons that possess the locals and kill the living in order to pave the way for the coming of an ancient evil known as Aeloth, The Blind One. With the help of axe-wielding blonde hottie Medina, the metal-heads try to find a way to prevent Hell on Earth.

Is there anything more sublime in this world than a heavy metal horror movie? The world's foremost form of music genre with the greatest combination of film known to man to create an exquisite experience for connoisseurs of peerless audio visual entertainment. If I'm brutally honest, the script for Deathgasm is a bit of a mess, the action lurching awkwardly from one scene to the next, but its mixture of metal mayhem and outrageous splatter is so irresistible that a completely coherent narrative is of little consequence. The riffs are heavy and the gore is very gory (with the graphic dismemberment achieved through the use of practical effects), which is what matters most with this type of flick.

Directed by Jason Lei Howden, who clearly knows his music and his horror, Deathgasm owes a lot to the splatter classics of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, his film possessing a similarly energetic and madcap style. When the demons attack, anything and everything becomes a weapon: an angle grinder, an engine block, a chainsaw, an axe, a weed whacker, a big, black, double-ended dildo, some love beads, and a pair of vibrators. That's right… Deathgasm features a fight scene in which the heroes are armed with sex toys, which should give you some idea of just how demented the film really is.