Rock N’ Roll Nightmare – 1987, John Fasano

 

Rock N’ Roll Nightmare is a Canadian horror/music film that fails at everything except being Canadian. The film is successfully Canadian. Written by and starring

Z-Grade butt rocker and bodybuilder Jon Mikl Thor, it follows a supposedly popular heavy metal band called Triton as they bed down in an isolated Canadian farmhouse for a month in hopes of recording new material. Don’t let the rural setting fool you, though, this is a hard rockin’, chart toppin’ juggernaut of a heavy metal band, so expect to see these rowdy rock stars on their worst behavior, you’re gonna see a whole lot of:

• Being Polite
• Reading Quietly before bed
• Always displaying a positive message
• And doing the dishes, as seen here:

Whoo- Rock and roll!

Seriously- I thought these guys were a heavy metal band!!! What kind of band is this!? Do you have any idea how often people do the dishes in this movie? It’s absolutely ridiculous, it happens over and over again- these people are better behaved than I am! Well… They are Canadian, I guess. Actually, I guess it’s not fair to call them complete prudes- they do pack in kind of a lot of sex scenes.

 Including one where these two get it on. I bet you’re real excited for that.

While working on their new material, all of which is just terrible, by the way, Triton is plagued by two horrible, dark entities, firstly; some bizarre, evil force from Hell that seems to be picking off people one by one while somehow remaining totally undetected, and two: Stig, their drummer, who is a massive hunk of bullshit shaped into a human, and who ruins everything all day everyday just by being alive.

This is Stig, the biggest piece of shit in the whole fucking world.

Stig sucks like crazy. The actor playing Stig also sucks. Part of what makes Stig such a vicious attack on your desire to continue living is his accent; this character has the lousiest, phoniest sounding Australian accent of all time, it’s cringe inducing. It makes Tarantino’s accent in Django Unchained sound pro-level. It’s like the closest thing to dialogue coaching this guy got was to be shown a photograph of a Koala bear and be told that Australians “Sorta sounded like people from England, only slower. Okay, action!” Later on in the film Stig is murdered (thank you) and replaced by a demon replicant who doesn’t even have an accent, but nobody in the band seems to mind the change given that this new Stig is a better drummer and is less obnoxious.

 

If it is wrong to kick a man when it’s down, then it is, frankly, unethical to apply any form of criticism to Rock N’ Roll Nightmare, because no man could ever be more down than this, but I am going to go ahead and confirm what you probably expect; this is a low budget, lame, badly made film with little in the way of talent, on, or off screen. That’s really about all that can be said, except, that is, for a detailed, photographic essay on the films climax, which is just fucking ridiculous. Ordinarily I would shy away from revealing the end of a film, but this time I’m absolutely going to walk you through the ending because, for one, it’s the only reason to talk about this movie in the first place, and two, who gives a fuck? That being said, if you fear spoilers, turn away now. Turned away yet, have you? On we go, to the film’s hilarious climax.