Heavy Metal Movies (Book)
Written by Mike McPadden
Published by Bazillion Points
Mike “McBeardo” McPadden hails from New Jersey. As we know, the Jerz is the hot bed of metalheads. As someone into punk rock who lived in Central NJ, I was kindred with the metalheads. They were the only ones that would speak to me, defiantly wearing their Man-o-War t-shirts and clutching their D&D manuals under a hail of spitballs. This is a tough breed. And in a school of non-punks, they shall take in the punk as their feral pyramid spiked child.
When I hear someone is into metal, they can only be a super-fan. No one “kinda” likes metal. There are no middle-of-the-roaders. You fucking love metal. Metal is your life, and I have never seen anyone give up Slayer later in life; they’d rather divorce. It stays with them and informs their views on how to party, what is awesome, and cranking all sweet tunes up to 14.
Sure, the look might change, but it’s in your heart and every Dio-loving cell of your body. Talk to a metalhead about their love of metal—they can go on for hours. I asked a metal denizen about Ghost at Texas Frightmare, and a mere one hour later I had the full history and all of the influences—and my friend could have gone on even longer, but she needed to jet for some metal reason or another.
A huge part of the metal culture is steeped in horror imagery and mythology—monsters, Satan, demons, ritual magic, corpse paint, barking at the moon. Just look at the artwork on the album covers (Megadeth, Black Sabbath, W.A.S.P), the lyrics (“Enter to the graveyard, Walk among the tombstones, Smell the putrid stench of rotting flesh, decayed bones”—Mortician), the Venom t-shirts and gear at the conventions—Sacrilege, Celtic Frost, Cannibal Corpse. The list goes on. Skulls, blood, torture, hot babes. You might see a few punks (hello), but no, mostly metalheads run the scene.
And so it seems quite natural that we now have a metal genre book, Heavy Metal Movies, that captures the spirit of all that is metal brought down from the heavens by lightning and inscribed in blood. Its full title is Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever!, and the introduction brings us to a place of my childhood too, New Jersey’s Keansburg Amusement Park, where McPadden first viewed a film that would change his life: King Kong.
He discovered KISS, punk from the Uncle Floyd show (The Ramones), and soon was renting everything he could with the help of Danny Peary’s book Cult Movies and Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Film Guide. We also get the lowdown on the wonderful trash on ‘the deuce’ (42nd Street) before it became an urban Disneyland.
The book is organized by letter and coded by metal keywords like Satan, Slasher, Haunted House, The Beast, Crucifixion, and Pirates. Before we even enter into the madness, we have an introduction by His Lord and Savior, Alice Cooper, which covers his stint in cinema with such highlights as Monster Dog (I have this on betamax), The Decline of Western Civilization 2, and Wayne’s World. Unlike Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly, which was rigorous in its focus to document every appearance of a punk/new waver in film history, Heavy Metal Movies speaks to the broader concept of “what is ‘metal’?” That definition can be quite idiosyncratic to McPadden and is the gestalt of all the things he loves that make his brain wail with 10-minute guitar leads.
The title and back of the book boast over 666 reviews with the selection of movies seeming to be all over the place (among those the book features entries for are The Empire Strikes Back, Joe Dirt, Return to Oz, Cannibal Holocaust, Star Crash, and Werewolves on Wheels). Each entry charts a point along a personal path: when McPadden saw the film and its impact on his life.
His style is casual and very, well, metal—that is, it’s authentic and true, recalling a certain voice of the past, the late Chas Balun and his Gore Score (a publication which can also be assessed as “metal”). This is a much different approach than Weldon’s book, which is more of a documentation of flicks of curious interest, published during the dark days before the internet and the DVD/Blu-ray boom, when VHS tapes at the time were one hundred dollars a pop, if you were lucky. And unless you were next to a Kim’s Video or a TLA, there was no way you’d see Forbidden Zone or El Topo. It was just a genre dream. Now, with the internet, conventions, and more boutique distribution, the films he discusses are not out of the reach of his readers. Again, though, it’s not so much a genre catalog as it is McPadden’s personal journey through his cinematic obsessions.
Though the cover is a fully illustrated creature show complete with zombies and slime monsters (it should be its own poster or concert tee), its guts are black and white and designed as a death metal ‘zine should be—blackletter, grunge, and pentagrams (all pointing down appropriately). The book contains some poster reproductions in black and white, but much like the true-crime books and genre movie novelizations we would sneak peeks at in ‘70s and ‘80s bookstores, the center of the book is filled with six pages of reproductions of posters such as The Howling, C.H.U.D., Autopsy, Rock and Rule, The Dunwich Horror, and The Norsemen from different countries of origin all in gory color.
Once you’ve dared make it to the end, you have three appendices—”66.6 Most Metal Moments in Film,” followed by notable metal moments in non-metal films and TV. No rune stone is left unturned.
In the end, Heavy Metal Movies is a good companion piece to Psychotronic, The Phantom of the Movies’ Ultimate Video Guide, and Destroy All Movies!!!. What makes this book different is that it’s not just a list, but McPadden’s own exploration through the genre. You learn about his brutal passion for cinema of all kinds. And while I would note you could call a lot of these films fucking punk rock (Return of the Living Dead is appropriated in this tome), I think we all get what it means to be “metal.”
5 out of 5
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