a review of 魔界舞男

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT THIRTY-THREE BONUS #3: The third and final of Cinemonster's "extra credit" picks for this year's challenge. Clearly this was picked due to Ozzy Osbourne's (RIP) brief cameo as an anti-rock fundamentalist preacher on TV. But it's also kind of a fun time capsule of the time when heavy metal (or at least the post-glam/pre-grunge "hair metal" version of it, ca. 1986) was still the subject of moral panics around lyrical content and supposed backward-masked messages. This movie represents kind of a meeting of the pop culture nerds, with AMERICAN GRAFFITI's sad-sack Terry (Charles Martin Smith) directing Marc Price (Skippy from FAMILY TIES) as a put-upon teenage metalhead who's the target of some pretty extreme bullying by obnoxious preppies. When he is gifted a one-of-a-kind (but not so one-of-a-kind) pressing of his favorite metal singer's posthumously-released final album, all hell starts to break loose. LITERALLY. 😅 I was on board for this one for the first 30 minutes or so, but I really wish it could have settled on a particular tone or sense of consistency around whether it wanted to be a pure B-grade horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street vein, or something spoofing those kinds of movies. I love a good horror comedy, or at least a bit of comic relief in a straight horror, but there's moments in this that feel like they're coming from a different kind of movie entirely. There's a scene with a character wearing a conspicuously long and skinny tie for literally no other reason than the movie needed him to get it caught in an industrial metal-shop machine. Or the bit during the climactic battle where Price somehow tricks(?) the electrified villain into stumbling hands-first into an open toilet before flushing it. This movie reminded me a lot of another of-its-time cult horror flick, 1994's BRAINSCAN starring Edward Furlong, which feels like a direct conceptual rewrite substituting the '90s panic over violent video games (which also led to a frankly silly labeling system) for metal. It even has a similarly ridiculous-looking antagonist who takes the form of a middle-aged hair-metal frontman; It's a sorta dated costume choice for 1994, but he would have fit in perfectly in this movie.