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Gimme a minute while I try to establish a little cred: in 1974, back when the boys in greasepaint were still so poor they were using fake Marshall stacks with no speakers to make their stage presence more imposing, I skipped out of working on a freshman college term paper on James Thurber so some friends of mine and I, who played in a band that covered nearly every song on the first two KISS albums, could drive a couple hours to see them warmup for ZZ Topp. After their last encore I brushed the ashes out of my hair and crawled under the stage around to the back in hopes of meeting them, which I didn’t. Then I drove back home and wrote and wrote all ni-i-ite to finish the paper -- which I got a understandably mediocre grade on, but still finished with an A in the course. So don’t tell me that what follows is unfair because I simply don’t appreciate the phenomenon.
If Detroit Rock City had come out 20 years ago, at the time it was set, it certainly would have done better at the boxoffice. But it still wouldn’t have been a better movie. Chronicling the quest of four Cleveland high school students, who coincidentally play in a band that does KISS covers, trying to get to the Motor City and into a sold-out show, it’s little more than a sophomoric, juvenile exercise in bad taste. The kids variously steal a car, smoke dope, trash another car, try to rob children and a convenience store, have sex to some extent, and subject us to what Monty Python would have called“the longest continuous vomit...since John Barrymore puked over Laertes in the second act of Hamlet in 1941,” all in the name of rock and roll. It’s not that there wasn’t some potential in the basic theme -- i.e., how and why such an unlikely group attracted an army of young white male fans -- but you’ll learn more about that by watching “Behind the Music” or Penelope Spheeris’s documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2 -- The Metal Years.
Who is this movie aimed at? There aren’t enough new KISS fans of typical moviegoing age to make it a hit, and the late-thirty- to early fortysomethings who were rabid followers when it was set have hopefully grown up at least enough to demand better-made entertainment than this. Starring Edward Furlong, Sam Huntington (Jungle 2 Jungle), and even lesser-known Giuseppe Andrews and James DeBello as the crusading teens, this exercise in vanity was produced by Gene Simmons, written by a first-time scripter, and directed by Adam “Riff” Rifkin, whose credits include The Invisible Maniac and Psycho Cop Returns. Worst, and strangest, of all, one of the sexual conquests, named Beth (what else?), is played by Melanie Lynskey, who starred opposite Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s mesmerizing Heavenly Creatures.
Guys? Next time you hope to further line your pockets with an exercise in cinematic self-aggrandizement, howzabout not shouting it out quite so loud? F
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