By Keri O’Shea
Although it’s hardly the first musical genre to bear the association, you have to admit that the relationship between heavy metal and black magic is a strong one. Forget your Stryper and your POD; we all know that these bands are basically aberrations in a pleasingly-familiar landscape of devils, witches and caco-daemons. What else would you want from a genre that’s so beloved out of outsiders? Bizarrely, though, despite the fact that more bands than you can count will quite openly pay homage to Old Scratch in their lyrics, merchandise, imagery and interviews, metal has always been dogged by the sort of people who overlook all of this to look for hidden messages of evil. It’s the obvious thing to do, after all; never mind what the lyrics say when you play them forwards – let’s focus on what they clearly don’t say when you play ’em backwards! This idea of covert Satanism has jogged alongside the musical genre since the 1980s, and along the way it’s given us some fun horror cinema. Perhaps most notably to my mind, 1986’s Trick or Treat neatly combined paranoia about metal musicians, strands of the occult and a boy coming of age under extreme duress. It’s an obvious comparison to make to this year’s terrific Deathgasm (2015), but I think for me the newer film has the clear edge, simply because it has the nerve to play out so joyously. It sends metal up as only someone who really gets metal could do – namely by laughing with metal, not at metal.
Teenager Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a metalhead; he’s also just had to move in with his very sour, very religious aunt and uncle, and his obnoxious bully of a cousin after his mother got herself…in trouble, shall we say. For him it’s so far, so bad; adding to this, he gets a hard time at school and gets forced to play D&D with his only friends Dion and Giles at lunchtime. It’s only when he meets Zakk (spelled with two Ks, of course) at the local record shop that things begin to turn around for him. Zakk (James Blake) is a confirmed dickhead, but his musical tastes are impeccable and he offers the rest of the guys the opportunity to form a band at last – the eponymous Deathgasm of the title, and only one of the list of suggested band names mentioned during this film which both a) made me laugh out loud and b) sounded precisely as if I probably already own them. Deathgasm could have gone on as a garage band from this point onwards and caused no harm to anyone, then; Brodie could have pined for the lovely Medina (Kimberley Crossman) and life could have rolled on. It could have, were it not for the fact that Zakk finds out, via a local ‘zine, that one of their mutual heroes from a band called Hexensword has actually resurfaced – as luck would have it, very near to where they live. The best course of action? A fan letter? Hanging around, hoping for a sighting? Nah. Instead Zakk encourages Brodie to join him in breaking into the home of the erstwhile Rikki Daggers (yes, two Ks again) before attempting to steal a rare slab of Hexensword vinyl from his grasp; they fail somewhat, but escape with a strange collection of antique pages – pages which contain music, music which is seemingly being sought by a strange group of occultists, who have been trying to trace Daggers for years. In the meantime, however, Deathgasm of course play the music they’ve discovered…
Doing just enough to craft believable, funny characters with a spot-on script and great pace before pitching them into a maelstrom of blood splatter and demonic possession, not to mention making succinct fun of the association between metal and the occult, this is the most fun I’ve had with a film in a long while. I’d hazard a guess that this is because director Jason Lei Howden and his team had at least as much fun making it. The whole project just beams, every time it gets away with yet another savage SFX take or a deadpan line (or quite often, both in one fell swoop). Howden has some serious credentials as a filmmaking professional, but this is his first feature-length movie, and even as a complete stranger I can almost hear that thought process which goes ‘This is my film, and I’m going to do all the things I’ve been itching to do for years’. Speaking of those SFX skills, Deathgasm will certainly win favour with many genre fans who love to see practical effects rather than a lot of CGI-by-default; I think there’s room for a little of the latter, personally, but the film certainly looks good in red.
There do seem to be some clear inspirations for the film. To name just a notable couple, the possessions here – jerky movements, shrill voices, rapid physical decay – are strongly reminiscent of Sam Raimi at his best (ahem, Evil Dead II) and the sheer levels of gore involved remind me of Peter Jackson, back before he made that mind-boggling leap from lo-fi vomit-drinking to red carpets and Oscars. All in all, though, despite its lineage, Deathgasm is very much its own film too. It always feels affectionate towards the music it’s sending up; this is vital. Metal fans have never minded a laugh and we will readily laugh at one another (by the way, nice homage to an Immortal video in the Deathgasm promo!) but I think, generally, we don’t want to be mocked by someone who has no knowledge or interest in metal, because the jokes are always hackneyed and shit. A real sense of warmth prevents that from being the case here, and helps allow for a balance between human interest – yes, really – and high action, so even if you don’t laugh at the Manowar reference, then you’ll find plenty else to laugh about.