 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Death to Metal • Year: 2019 • Country: USA • Director: Tim Connery • Main cast: Alex Stein, Grace Melon, Andrew Jessop, Charlie Lind, Dan Flannery • Runtime: 80 minutes • Production company: Smoking Section Films, Wild Eye Releasing (distribution) • TRAILER
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Just one first sentence to sum up the whole thing and then I can go more into detail. If you are into heavy metal and/or gory horror movies, and you are not only looking for big-budget productions, attitude is the thing for you, add right now Death to Metal (2019) to your watch list.
That said, Death to Metal (2019) is a movie simple in its premise, not very original in its development, but full of enjoyable moments. It centers on a priest whose radical thoughts about punishment and sin even make feel a retrograde organization like a small-town parish too extreme and he gets thrown away. Then, in a rage rampage, he crashes his car and is reborn as some kind of superhuman punisher zombie with the only mission of disciplining the blasphemous goers of the metal scene. On the other side, poor metal dude Zane has been dumped by his girlfriend and kicked out of his band. But the biggest metal festival of the year is happening in town, so he convinces his cute friend Mariah, with who he has a very obvious unsolved sexual tension, to come along with him to the gig. So, yeah, you can kinda complete the rest of the story, you won’t go very far from what is to witness in the film. Looking good so far, isn’t it?
Right in the first minutes of the running time, when you see the dumb probably drunk workers dumping toxic waste in a river, you instantly know this is going to be “one of those movies”. This can be a bad thing because you know it’s going to be full of cliches, and a good thing because we love those cliches. And that’s exactly what Death to Metal (2019) delivers, with no intentions to fool anyone. What you see is what you get.
This movie has a lot of limitations, starting from the script and following with the acting. Still, the cast and crew are aware of those limitations so they try to dodge them with a generous dosage of gore scenes, an appreciated sense of humor, and lots of music. Death metal group Mutilated by Zombies and stoner doom Telekinetic Yeti appear as themselves in the movie in a portrait of what a small town underground metal festival can be: dealing with a bunch of drunks, problems with the bands, people with too much ego or two little brains who just want to fuck with you, and juggling with all kinds of setbacks in order to perhaps get some profits and still have a good time. Because, let’s be honest, those are the constant issues of any underground rock gig, but in the many I’ve attended to in my time I haven’t seen a mutated murderer slashing the audience, or at least I don’t recall that. Let’s just leave that for the fiction.
Death to Metal (2019) is really not that bad, we all have seen worse ones. It’s not very original but it has its personality. Also, it has some hilarious moments that can make you laugh out loud while attending to the bloodbaths. A horror movie made by fans of horror and for the fans of horror. And of extreme metal. The movie is already available on digital, so if this weekend you are quarantined because of stupid covid, or you just want something to do to have a chill good time, go check it out.
RATE: 6/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt8396130
