Spoiled Rotten: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

by Ace McIntyre
KTSW Other Side Drive

I’m here to inform you about unbelievably bad movies that you never knew existed, with problems ranging from bad acting to non-existent sound design, these things are bottom of the barrel

Rock n Roll nightmare is a dumb horror flick directed by the late John Fasano and released in 1987, you know, the year that also gave us Robocop, the Untouchables, and Princess Bride to name a few much better films.

The leading star is Jon Mikl-Thor, in real life the leader of the Canadian band Thor and a bodybuilding champion, but here as singer John Triton and the rest of his band the Tritonz decide camp out in an isolated house to record new material because in a nearby barn Alice Cooper set up a fully functional recording studio.  The house has been abandoned for ten years due to the presumed death of the family that lived there, probably because of that wife skeleton that popped out of the oven at the opening scene.

The band moves in and they try to establish themselves as individuals we should care about but they failed so bad that I thought the guitarist and bass player was the same person. The people are Jon Triton, a broke manager, the complaining girlfriend, neglected wife/girlfriend, lovestruck newly weds, lovestruck other people, and a bad Aussie accent.

They record forgettable 80’s rock track after forgettable 80’s rock track with the highlights in these scenes being the keyboardist chicken-like dance moves. Jon Triton also has some ridiculous wardrobe, going from metallic women’s business jacket to red polka dotted 50’s fashioned dress with matching pants. But they are not alone as demons, who sometimes look like shiny rubber muppets to green zombie vampires, start picking them off one by one and replacing them with …demon-ish versions of themselves. In fact we don’t find out they are demons into the very end, to be honest I really thought this was an alien invasion movie.

There’s no atmosphere in this movie, we don’t know how dangerous these demon are or their motivation for why they’re messing with the band, so we don’t care or worry about them which is the main reason why this movie is not scary at all. The characters aren’t even worry about the strange disappearances of fellow bandmates. No one is paranoid or suspicious about what’s going on, no one sees anything out of the ordinary until it’s too late to give them an idea that something supernatural is going on. If the characters aren’t afraid or worry about your horror how do you think the audience would be?

The soundtrack is outstanding because whatever track they’re playing does not fit into the scene and automatically makes ‘em hilarious. Especially the sex scene between the guitarist and keyboardist because it’s already unnecessarily long but then you got a dopey sound effects track over it to really bring in in ‘Why Was This Acceptable’ factor. The beginning monologue of Jon in the van is inaudible because sound design thought it was more important to listen to the anti- spooky track, which they were right about because script in this movie doesn’t even try to write something believable. It’s like watching your family on vacation, they do some things together then they do some things alone but nothing is happening or progressing, everyone is bland and content to stay that way. No one has a character arch or a problem they’re trying to deal with except for recording a few songs which I guess got accomplished so good on them for that.

In the end Jon is confront by his demonized girlfriend that he just blows of. And when she reveals her true demon form and tells him that there’s not hope, he laughs in its face and confesses that NOBODY existed except him and he is actually Triton, the archangel. This twist is baffling on every level, like if he wanted to trick the demon wouldn’t his last name and the name of his band NOT be Triton to give it away?, how did the demon fall for it anyway?, How do demons possess things that aren’t there?, and why did we even attempt to care for figments of imagination for most of the movie. A twist in a movie is supposed to tie the movie’s loose knots together, not raise more questions, and make sense even though it’s something that the audience didn’t see. There’s clues about what the twist is leading up to it that you usually don’t catch in the first viewing, encourages rewatchablity. A twist is incredibly hard to pull off and you need near perfect writing skills; this movie already proved that it didn’t pass an introductory screenwriting class. I would be angrier if it wasn’t angels, this may be the first angel outside a religious motivated movie.

But all that frustration is worth it because the fight scene is one of the greatest in dumb film history. If you’re not going to see this movie at least find this scene somewhere because it’s insane. There’s hand holding, overacting stink eyes, alien octopus shurikens and puppetry. And the best song in this scene that I would put up on the list of motivational songs to workout out to in a neon zebra-striped leotard. And it all finally ends with a lingering shot of a random house in suburbia because that’s how you learn to end movies without going to school.