The Fiesta 13 1980’s Horror Movie OctoVember Challenge #12: Black Roses (1989) (Shudder)
62 1980’s Horror Movies in 62 Days.
Tipper Gore was right. Middle of the road, bland, corporate heavy metal causes high school students to commit atrocities.
One of the ’80’s subgenres of horror that I didn’t see a lot of at the time was the whole “Heavy Metal is satanic” series of movies. Not really a fan of mediocre heavy metal, but let’s try and rectify that horror hole with a few movies.
Hard to know who’s the hero of this movie is as they follow roughly 20 characters at the beginning. A heavy metal band, Black Roses, is starting their tour in a generic midwestern town (really, Canada). They are tools of Satan. Eventually, the sympathetic English teacher emerges as the one to throw gasoline on Satan and save the kids.
The movie begins slow, but if you start with the death of Big Pussy from The Sopranos (his first role) about a half hour in, the rest of the movie picks up with random killings by heavy metal obsessed ‘young adults’ at a fairly even clip. The effects are fun, in the rubber-puppet variety, and while the metal is pretty forgettable, the movie does go out of its way to compare Walt Whitman and today’s crappy metal.
One thing we did not know: Metal bands write Power Ballads primarily to show adults their music is palatable and not, repeat not, the music of Satan.
‘Effin’ Tipper Gore.
The Trailer:
An added note, I’ve started about three other Metalsploitation films, but didn’t finish them as they were Gawd-Awful. The Fiesta 13 1980’s Horror Movie OctoVember Challenge is only met when we finish a movie. Boy, what a lot of wasted mousse.
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The Fiesta 13 