The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Will Shred Your Eyes And Guts (But Not In A Good Way):
Deathgasm, dir. Jason Lei Howden
Reviewed by: Glenn Dunks
Deathgasm should have been fun. Huddling together with a crowd of horror fans after midnight while the city sleeps around us, indulging in blood and gore and stuff that makes our stomachs churn with scares and laughs is should be one of the best parts of any film festival, but instead it turned out to be one of the worst.
It was revealed in the pre-film intro that NZ writer/director Jason Lei Howden got the chance to make his debut feature (after a couple of short films and an impressive career in visual effects on blockbusters) by entering a competition that involved coming up with the coolest synopsis. It’s obvious he didn’t think far beyond that.
While Deathgasm does have a neat story involving a band of teenage death metal-loving outcasts raising a demon and sending their dead-end town to hell and back, it ultimately becomes a sad display of incessant bro comedy full of lazy writing. It mines for cheap giggles at gory sight-gags about male genitals getting whipper-snapped, men being penetrated up the arse doggy-style by chainsaws, and a demonically possessed man shouting “Who wants to get skull-fucked to death?” as the fey, cowardly sissy is offered up as a sacrifice. Ugh.
Where the film works is in the visuals. It definitely looks fantastic for what I assume was a low budget production. Although the blood and guts that come spewing out of every orifice are often so grotesque that the intended laughs are replaced by repulsed groans (I flinched at one scene with intestines, I admit), they’re gruesome enough to appease gore-hounds.
Unfortunately, while horror movies are conventionally some of the best places to find subversive material pertaining to race, gender and suburban class, Deathgasm avoids it at every turn. It doesn’t offer any critique of small-town NZ society. The lone female character of any consequence appears as a pure dude fantasy with her love of sex, token lesbian fantasy sequence, and empowering speech about how the straight, young, white leading dude can overcome anything.
Most annoying of all, the pervading sense of ‘cult’ looms over the film as if those who made it were unaware that the label isn’t something that can be manufactured. Juvenile can work, and the filmmakers obviously had a joy making it, but watching it was like hell on Earth.
For fans of: Death metal, blood and guts, #nohomo lols
Opening in Australia: TBC