As a
kid in the eighties, one of the great illicit thrills of a trip to the video
store was to browse the horror aisles and gaze in morbid fascination at the
lurid covers of the films one wasn’t allowed to see (what the Brits called
“video nasties”). It was a different world – a grown up’s world - but all the
same: what weird wickedness lay therein?
It
would almost come as a relief to find, in adulthood, that the overwhelming
majority of these were way too inept and amateurish to frighten or even bother
anyone. They almost never lived up to the expectation – which is just as well,
considering what kids are capable of imagining. It’s the kind of let-down the
Youtube generation will never know.
Terror
on Tour is certainly no exception. I
took a special interest in this one for its rock themes. Rock music has always
blended well with horror films. There’s always been a mystique around it that
seems to demand supernatural treatment, to say nothing of its appeal to outlaw
aesthetics and baser, primitive instincts. By the time it started mutating into
Heavy Metal, all superstition, demonology and minor chords, horror seemed the
only way to cinematically treat it. Even the straight up docudrama Lords of
Chaos felt the need to include surreal nightmare sequences more akin to The
Conjuring than Bohemian Rhapsody.
But back to Terror on Tour. Not-surprisingly, the
movie’s not that good. Quite surprisingly though, the music, written and
performed by a real band called “The Names”, rather is. At least to my taste.
While it is a bit upbeat for the subject matter, it nevertheless has that
guitar and drum-filled energy that pulses through all good rock and roll. This
makes all the difference: not only does it lends it authenticity but almost
compensates for the script and the acting.
Years ago when I gazed upon this VHS box with a mixture of
disdain and delight, I assumed the Kiss-klone-killer-klown band would be
supernatural entities, demons who devoured their audience. Alas, this is just a
regular band, who’ve had the bad luck to inspire a killer with a knife. Oh
well.
And yet. . .that secular nature of it almost – very nearly
might have – made Terror on Tour a far more interesting movie than it
was surely intended to be. For most of the movie, the focus isn’t the killer
but the band. An ordinary rock band. Not even an international-phenomenon of a
band, but a hard gigging, impoverished indie-band, who’ve only just found a
gimmick that might push them over the edge.
A lot of the drama early on is just the drama of being in a
band. Poverty. Substance abuse. Artistic unfulfillment. Slogging from one mangy
hall to the next. Hitting up sleazy managers and venue owners for royalties.
Incompetent stage techs. Big dreams. Bad
behaviour. There is a verisimilitude about it that I can’t entirely dismiss. Credit is due to a film that doesn't try to glamourize the music industry. With
a more creative script or director, this could have been another Slade In
Flame.
Alas, these scenes are incredibly boring, delivered with all
the intensity of a grade-school play. We are left waiting for it to deliver its
initial promise as a low-budget knife kill film. Here too it is lacklustre –
there is little real attempt to use the techniques of modern film – say shadows,
camera angles or creative editing – to create any kind of suspense, even if the
script did allow for it. Having said that, the final chase, through the
basements of the theatre, shot in silence with only the noise of the band playing
upstairs, is surprisingly effective.
I wonder if this is the film that so annoyed Carol J. Clover
in her book Men Women and Chainsaws, for setting up the “final girl”
trope, only to very abruptly subvert it. This is what happens here – Don
Edmunds, future director of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, isn’t about to have
any empowered women in HIS film.
All but one of the victims are women – groupies, hookers and
one drug dealer – bumped off by men for providing what these men wanted in the
first place. Sexualized then brutalized. I wonder, are these movies an indictment
of said double standard, or an instance of it? Who can say? All I know is, this is a film that promises lurid
violence, almost all of it is against women, and there is no female retaliation.
Make of that what you will.
So it’s trash, but with a good soundtrack. As music is the way to my heart, and in cinema can redeem (or at least dilute) almost any flaw, I cannot quite dismiss it. I wouldn't recommend it either, necessarily. Think of it as an artifact or a genre and an era. Imagine what the hippie generation must have thought of Kiss and Alice Cooper, imagine a time when film-making was grimy and cheap and remember the days when video-rental was something of a Russian-roulette, when the satisfaction of morbid curiosity was possibly the biggest part of the appeal.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you'll dig it. If you don't, you won't.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you'll dig it. If you don't, you won't.
