Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Deathgasm Blu-ray Movie Review

Some Kind of Monsters

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 7, 2016

Deathgasm is an exuberant splatter film from New Zealand, an unapologetic homage to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and Dead Alive, with a difference: Deathgasm's blood bath isn't caused by aliens, zombies or a mutant virus. It's unleashed by malcontent teenagers playing heavy metal in a garage band. All those rebellious lyrics about demons, hellfire and damnation turn out to be true. As the film's executive producer summarized the pitch: "Two head-bangers summon demonic forces. Boom!"

Writer/director Jason Lei Howden drew much of the script from his background growing up as an isolated metalhead in a small mining community. But instead of unleashing Armageddon, like the teens in his film, Howden found an outlet in horror movies, which became all the more alluring because he wasn't allowed to watch them at home. While he found his entree into the film industry working as a visual compositor for effects house WETA Digital, Howden remained a fan of old-fashioned practical effects, and he didn't like what he was seeing in the cinema. "I'm distraught about the amount of found-footage supernatural films being churned out into the world", he has said. "Every second horror movie is a cheap shaky-camera possession horror. . . . It [should be] all about laughs, guts, and fun."

In 2013, Howden submitted his concept for a low-budget gorefest to the Make My Horror Film competition sponsored by the New Zealand Film Commission. Out of 500 entries, Deathgasm was selected as the winner, thereby gaining a startup budget, an experienced producer in the person of Ant Timpson (Housebound), and additional funding from MPI Media Group, owner of Dark Sky Films. Deathgasm premiered in March 2015 at the SXSW Film Festival, then played numerous festival dates, followed by a limited U.S. theatrical release in October. Dark Sky is issuing the film on a Blu-ray disc labeled to look like an old-fashioned LP.

The narrator and star of Deathgasm is Brodie (Milo Cawthorne), a long-haired metal freak who is sent to live with his Uncle Albert and Aunt Mary (Colin Moy and Jodie Rimmer) in Greypoint after his meth-head mother is committed to a psych ward. From the moment he arrives, Brodie does not belong. His aunt and uncle are devout Christians, who are horrified by Brodie's interests. His jock cousin, David (Nick Hoskins-Smith), resents Brodie as an intruder and bullies him at school. The bullying escalates to beating after the class beauty, Medina (Kimberley Crossman), looks more favorably at Brodie than she does at David. Medina likes the elaborate artwork that the new kid sketches while ignoring their math teacher, Mr. Capenhurst (Cameron Rhodes). When Brodie gives Medina a metal CD to slip into her Discman, the girl is transformed.

Befriended by two other outcasts, Dion (Sam Berkley) and Giles (Daniel Cresswell), Brodie finds the ideal friend (or so he thinks) in Zakk (James Blake), the local rebel, whom he meets at a record shop and who adopts Brodie as a kind of pet. Together they embark on adventures for which Brodie, by himself, would be too timid. One of them involves breaking into the secret lair of legendary rock star, Rikki Daggers (Stephen Ure), who just happens to be hiding out in Greypoint and from whom they acquire some ancient pages containing musical notation. Brodie thinks the song will be perfect for the new band he's formed with Zakk, Dion and Giles, which Zakk has christened "Deathgasm". But when the foursome performs the ancient anthem, all hell breaks loose—literally.

The first half of Deathgasm pays tribute to all aspects of metal fandom, with Frank Frazetta-inspired fantasies, a graphic-novel visual style and a defiantly adolescent sense of revolt. Like Marlon Brando's Johnny in The Wild One, the members of Deathgasm have an unspoken understanding that, whatever you've got, they're rebelling against it. In the second half, as the demons summoned by the unwitting band ravage the town, Howden unleashes geysers of blood, limbs and viscera in an orgy of violence—and I do mean "orgy". The gore in Deathgasm is unabashedly sexualized. As actress Kimberley Crossman put it: "I never knew there were so many penises in this show!" When Stanley Kubrick had Little Alex in A Clockwork Orange murder a female victim with a giant phallic sculpture, he was making a statement about the nature of violence. Deathgasm doesn't seem to be making a statement so much as indulging a fetish, transforming sex toys into weapons, slicing off the privates of town inhabitants possessed by demons, and jamming power tools and other unlikely objects into every possible orifice. Even Medina gets into the act, as the former "good girl" is transformed into an axe-wielding Norse goddess, cleaving possessed bodies in two with a single stroke.

Howden could have satisfied both the metal crowd and the horror fans just by having his heroes beat back the demons, but he attempts something even bigger that is only partially successful. The onslaught of hell spawn turns out to be just an opening act for the main attraction, a demon king named Aeloth, who will return to establish his dominion over the earth. A secret society of Aeloth worshippers led by Aeon (Andrew Laing) arrives on the scene, looking to control the outcome, and while their antics are amusing, they needlessly complicate what is otherwise a brutally efficient narrative. When the demon king finally appears, the creature effects aren't startling enough to compete with the gross-out factor of everything that preceded them, and Howden's attempt to downshift into a sentimental resolution among the characters is only partially successful. (It's the kind of emotional heart tug that Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer achieved on a routine basis. But Deathgasm isn't that kind of film.) Stay for the ending, though, because the film's conclusion presents an interesting twist on musical immortality, and there's even an epilogue after the credits.

Deathgasm Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Deathgasm was shot by Simon Raby, a second unit director and cinematographer on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Elysium and District 9. In his commentary, Howden reveals that he too shot some scenes "on the fly", and that various digital cameras were used, ranging from a Red Epic to a cell phone. Despite the sundry sources, the finished film has a visual coherence, in part due to post-production processing on a digital intermediate and in part because the film's first half constantly switches between film and graphics, between the realistic and the imaginary, so that the viewer becomes acclimated to abrupt shifts in visual texture.

Making due allowance for the source's peculiarities, Dark Sky's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray provides an admirable image with solid blacks and colors that can turn vibrant and electric when necessary (as in certain fantasy elements), dark and shadowy as needed (e.g., in Rikki Daggers' house), and stylized like a glossy action film for some of the action sequences. Detail is superior, except where it has been deliberately obscured to help "sell" the practical effects. Jets and streams of blood run the gamut from bright red to deep scarlet.

Dark Sky/MPI has mastered Deathgasm with an average bitrate of 29.99 Mbps, which is appropriate given the rapid cutting and the frenetic action.

Deathgasm Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Deathgasm has a lively and loud 5.1 soundtrack, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA. The metal songs, by various New Zealand bands, sound cleaner and more distinct than they probably would on the audio systems depicted in the film, and they usually fill the surround array. The demonic impact of the ancient song that summons the underworld is felt all around, with deep bass rumbles, electric shocks and ominous creaks and crashes from all sides. Chainsaws and other weapons employed against the demon horde sound appropriately horrific, especially when they make contact with the flesh of former town inhabitants now possessed by evil spirits. Dialogue is clearly reproduced, and the New Zealand accents should be mild enough not to tax American ears. (If necessary, English SDH subtitles are available.) The original score is credited to New Zealand musicians Chris van der Geer and Joost Langeveld.

As is routinely the case with Blu-rays released by labels affiliated with MPI, an alternate PCM 2.0 track is also included.

Deathgasm Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Writer/Director Jason Lei Howden: Howden apologizes for too often lapsing into silently watching the film, but he does an effective job of conveying the history of the project, its autobiographical roots and a sense of the controlled chaos involved in principal photography, which lasted just 20 days.



• Brotherhood of Steel: The Cast of Deathgasm (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:02): This featurette focuses on lead actors Milo Cawthorne, James Blake and Kimberley Crossman.



• Demonseed: An Interview with Jason Lei Howden (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:25): Most of the material in this interview is duplicated in the commentary, but it's more tightly focused here. Also included is footage of Stephen Ure being made up as Rikki Daggers.



• Gorgasm: The FX of Deathgasm (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:14): Blood and gore technician Tim Wells and other crew work on various effects with Howden, including decapitations and genital severing. The extensive transformation of a stunt performer into the demon king Aeloth is also included.



• Music Video: Bulletbelt—"Deathgasm" (1080p; 2.35:1; 4:20): The song that concludes the film.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.35:1; 2:01): "You remember that evil heavy metal that your parents hate you listening to?"



• Teaser (1080p; 2.35:1; 0:59): A version composed mostly of quick cuts.



• Bonus Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for We Are Still Here, Mexico Barbaro, Applesauce and One Eyed Girl, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Deathgasm Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Howden recently announced that he has completed the script for a sequel to be called Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon. It's unclear whether any characters from the first film will return, but Howden has said that the sequel's first ten minutes will have more gore than all of the original Deathgasm. To paraphrase a line from Jaws: He's going to need a bigger band. As for the Deathgasm Blu-ray, the technical quality is superior and the extras are worthwhile. If blood, guts and metal are your thing, go for it.