By Geno McGahee
Oh, the 1980s…what a great and glorious time for both music and film. The connection between horror films and heavy metal music was evident and when the two joined forces, it was hard to beat. Films like BLACK ROSES, TRICK OR TREAT, SHOCK’EM DEAD and TERROR ON TOUR brought it and played with the idea that the spectacle of heavy metal was evil. It scared fat housemothers and all the teen metal heads laughed at the joke.
So we had the metal/horror connection, which ruled, but we also had the video stores and they featured a lot of SOV (shot on video) micro-budget horror movies and sometimes they tried their hand at a popular trend, which brings me to what some call the worst movie of all time: HEAVY METAL MASSACRE, written and starring David Defalco.
We begin with an endless intro where Bobbi Young (Defalco) looks at the camera and makes different hand gestures. He has that great 1980’s heavy metal look, but the movie immediately went crazy with different filters and effects. They really wanted to show off the editing program that they had and in 1989, prior to Final Cut, they had a right to brag. This may have been done by hooking up a VCR to another VCR, but however they did it, they did it.
The story is about the heavy metal Bobbi Young going around and killing young women while the metal soundtrack plays throughout. Really, this really was a big music video considering just how much they overplayed the music.
There are a couple of detectives on the streets looking for the killer and they harass a few people and play good cop, bad cop. They try to do their job, but the focus is quickly shifted back to Young. There is so much filler here. It’s incredible. They kept focusing on weapons, blood on the floor, and then they put a bunch of different filters on it while this less than great heavy metal music blared.
Young continues to seduce women and kill them and the detectives find a suspect and then they kill him and Young gets away…the end. It ended rather abruptly even though it ran 1 hour and 23 minutes. Does that mean that I wanted more? No. I didn’t.
Watching this movie, I think back to the films 555 and SLEDGEHAMMER, but this is not nearly as good and being worse than SLEDGEHAMMER takes some work. There is really no thought put into this film. If you cut out all the bullshit and all the slow motion shots and special effects and bad music, this would be a 20 minute film, but it is so overly padded, it’s difficult to get through and the killer is never explained. Why is he killing the girls? All we know is that he has bad hair and kills women.
HEAVY METAL MASSACRE was as advertised! It was as bad as it gets. I love heavy metal. I love no budget film. I love the SOV look. I love horror. I love everything this film was supposed to be, but it was terrible. It’s nearly unwatchable.
Rating: 1/10 – At least I like the 1980’s look…
