Deathgasm (2015)

Heavy metal is the devil's music. Hidden messages, backmasking, growling vocals, an all-black wardrobe, corpse paint, pentagrams - it's all what our parents warned us about. What if mom and dad were right?

Brodie is a high school metalhead living in a town full of squares. He has a small circle of friends, and the outcasts decided to start their own band. When they get their hands on an ancient piece of sheet music, they decide to try to play the tune. The church has warned about diabolus in musica for centuries, and in this case, a literal demon was summoned by the music. People are possessed, chaos ensues, and the metalheads are forced to try to save the day.

This is the second indie-horror-comedy out of New Zealand that I've watched for [Celluloid Hero] (I Survived A Zombie Holocaust is the other) and I'll be damned if they weren't both super-entertaining. Other countries have built up reputations for putting out amazing horror movies (Japan, South Korea) - I'm not sure if NZ is going to be the next hotbed of this genre. While the Asian style leans towards ghosts and children, the NZ style seems to be based on over-the-top gore, using lots of practical effects instead of CGI, and just maintaining a goofy tone to the horror.

The weaponry in the movie includes such diverse elements as paintball guns, straight razors, swords, chainsaws, power sanders, weed whackers, drills, dildos, and more. It's just a gushing geyser of blood, disemboweling, decapitation, and severed limbs. There is also an odd connection between this movie and the aforementioned Zombie Holocaust that surrounds male genital mutilation. I'm not sure if this is some weird subconscious thing that is part of the New Zealander's zeitgeist or just a coincidence, but it's now a permanent part of my impression of anyone from New Zealand.

If you like heavy metal but don't take it too seriously, if you can laugh at some of the absurdity of corpse paint and metal bands with indecipherable logos and the most vulgar names you can imagine, you'll dig Deathgasm.