Because I Am For Real: Black Roses (1988)
Plus Stuart Wellington of the Flop House
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on October 2018. This is an annotated version.
EXT. DETROIT OR WHEREVER IT DOESN’T MATTER — NIGHT1
Sweet sax jams hang in the air like bad B.O. as you survey generic big-city B-roll.2 You’re led to a concert venue. Inside, a crowd cheers. You see the silhouette of the singer. Strange. The lights come up and fans jump to their feet. You hear the crunch of Lizzy Borden’s “Me Against The World.” Cue close-ups of the band’s members: Oh shit, this is not Lizzy Borden…you think? Wait, who has seen Lizzy Borden? Maybe it’s Lizzy Bor-oh shit, these things are not…human? Barf, Maybe Lizzy Borden looks like Bodies: The Exhibition displaying Peppa Pig. Oh shit, here comes the pre-chorus hook: “BECUZ I AM FOR REEEEEAAAAL!” Great, that’s stuck in your head. Cut to a spellbound gentleman viewing the set from outside the venue. He’s quickly arrested for, uh, stuff. Hello, Sarah Koenig, there has been a miscarriage of justice. As the offending voyeur is dragged away, his accuser opens the doors and is stampeded by demonic patrons. They better have hand stamps for reentry.
Damn. Is this a dream? A nightmare? Did you lose your mind after making an incomprehensible string-theory yarn chart about Amorphis?3 No. You’re watching the beginning of Black Roses, maybe the most metal of the ’80s heavy metal horror movies.
Released 30 years ago in a temptingly forbidden 3D VHS box that still lives within the ids of ’80s adolescents, Black Roses is the final entry in director John Fasano’s informal trilogy of Bechdel test failing, hard friggin’ rockin’ flicks, all of which invaded rental shelves within the span of two years.
The first was 1986’s Zombie Nightmare, on which Fasano was the writer, assistant director, and zombie that dragged Adam West to heck.4 It would find a delightful second life as a masterful good-bad movie that ultimately received a hall of fame skewering by Mystery Science Theater 3000 (#604, nerds). While its objective quality is up for debate, and maybe defended only by the white-knightiest Tia Carrere keyboard warrior,5 it’s hard to deny the soundtrack that plucks songs from Motörhead, Girlschool, and Virgin Steele, along with underground fare like Death Mask and Canada’s Fist. And, oh yeah, there’s a little ditty by the movie’s lead, Jon Mikl Thor.6
The second, 1987’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare, is a full-on Thor starring vehicle. Provided that you have any affinity for the Canadian slab of bacon, it is glorious. We should really cover the whole muscle rock thing at some point, but if you’re unfamiliar and need a nudge to wade through this particular mess of metal, know that Thor’s John Triton utters the immortal line, “Let’s tune our weapons!” Hell yeah. Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare holds a 10 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Following the financial success of his prior work, Fasano was given the keys to another feature, this time with a comparatively enormous $450,000 budget. He wanted the right subject for a righteous soundtrack. He already had a plan.
“Back in the mid-1980s, there used to be a chick named Tipper Gore,” Fasano said in an extensive Brain Hammer interview that’s worth a read if you want to know how cheapo B-flicks were made in the twilight of celluloid. “[She] thought that rock music was the hand of the devil! Oh. Yeah.”78
Gore was one of four founders of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a committee once dedicated to protecting innocent children from objectionable lyrical content in music. Its claims to fame were: the “Filthy Fifteen,” one of the only playlists you’ll find with Venom and Cyndi Lauper outside of a try-hard hipster pinball arcade; a ridiculous 1985 Senate hearing that’s now remembered more for hero turns from Frank Zappa and Dee Snider than any of the professional doofuses positioning metal as a behavior-altering viral scourge; and the iconic “Parental Advisory” sticker that hilariously backfired and became a cheap marketing tool.9 Boy, am I glad the government doesn’t pursue transparently sanctimonious horseshit like that anymore.10
Anyway, Fasano and writer Cindy Cirile, credited for her script magick as Cindy Sorrell, decided to flip the PMRC’s message on its head by validating it. “Cindy and I got to talking — what if Tipper Gore was right and some heavy metal band was not only playing music of the devil, but was fronted by the Evil Dude himself,” Fasano said. “I figured the band would blow into some ‘Leave it to Beaver’ town and corrupt the morals of the kids….” And, after that opening concert, that’s exactly what viewers see lead singer Damian, played by Sal Viviano, and his minions doing: blowing into Hamilton, Ontario, recast as nowheresville Mill Basin, in the typical two-car caravan favored by all bands. The rides? Lambos, naturally. Hey, maybe they got into Bitcoin early.11
Soon, the band, made up of real rockers like drummer Carmine Appice, put up flyers featuring Damian’s mug fixed into a hypnotic, youth pastor sex glare. Yes, sleepy Mill Basin and its all-Americanadian high school is where Black Roses will kick off its impending blockbuster tour. Not…uh…the other place…that the band played…at the beginning of the movie….
Plot holes like that one, which probably made Black Roses unwatchable at the time, make it supremely watchable now, especially among viewers trained to find gold in lowbrow places. One such miner is my homie and consummate metalhead Stuart Wellington, one-third of the beloved Flop House podcast and proprietor of the Hinterlands bar in Brooklyn, New York.12 “I remember seeing the box for the VHS of Black Roses in the video rental of my local grocery store. It had that puffy cover and looked super evil, y’know, for a kid,” Wellington emailed to me. “I didn’t work up the courage to rent it until I was in high school and it got scooped up for an all-night horror movie binge. For weeks, my buddies and I were singing, ‘I am FOR REEEEEAAAAL.’”
That uncanny ability to be really bad in a really memorable way, much like Malört or Six Feet Under, has only intensified over the years, fermenting into something quite intoxicating when Wellington and I treated ourselves to a rewatch. “Black Roses has all the elements of great ’80s VHS horror: tons of blood, nudity, and overacting,” he said. “I mean, just watch any of the concert scenes and pay attention to the extras. They all seem to be participating in a completely different movie than the leads.” Yarp, just like this scene, which, if you play it in reverse, is basically Tooth & Nail Records’s marketing plan:13
The skeptical gent in the back with the ‘stache is Damian’s eventual foil, Professor Matthew Moorhouse, played by future soap opera silver fox John Martin. “The hero would be the person who was the hero in my life — [the student’s] hip English teacher, who is the only one who sees the changes going on in them,” Fasano noted. “I thought of it as a morality play, and Cindy went off and wrote the script heavy on psychological crap.”
The psychological crap starts to stir after Black Roses’s first set. The kids, now enthralled by Damian and, surely, Appice’s da-ya-think-I’m-sexy sulfuric musk, wild out in ways no teenager ever has before or will again. They do the drugs. They do the sex. They do…the murder. It’s up to Moorhouse to do battle with the devil and free his students from the intractable pull of satanic heavy metal insanity. Yeaow!14
The movie goes where you expect from there, just with way more verve than it should be licensed to carry. It has a crazy split-atom energy because it knows exactly what it is and totally does not at the same time. No spoilers, but let’s just say there’s a scene where Moorhouse strikes a demon with Appice’s gong mallet like he’s gladiator Neil Peart and…holy hell…is that Vincent Pastore from the Sopranos getting eaten by a speaker?
The latter scene almost didn’t make it into the movie. “I got a great lesson from my producer/distributor Jim Glickenhaus — the movie was lame,” Fasano said. The original cut didn’t have much monster stuff, so Fasano and the effects team went back to work and shot five new set pieces to punch things up. One of those effects guys? Richard Alonzo, a Winston Studio alum, who now works on tiny indie movies like Black Panther and Star Trek: Beyond.
Black Roses is packed full of these little moments of careers coming and going, which is where the real fun resides after the laughs. Apart from the aforementioned, you can see Carla Ferrigno, Lou’s wife, as the mayor’s daughter. In a self-aware nod, there’s also Julie Adams playing a PMRC-styled buzzkill. You might know her as the first crush of many monster kids like Fasano thanks to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon.
And then there’s the soundtrack. Bedecked with Metal Blade bona fides, it’s a very ’80s collection of delicious cheese, both of the semi-hard and soft variety.15 You’ll see names like Lizzy Borden, thrashers Hallows Eve, and shredder Alex Masi, who is a member of the Black Roses band that was formed for the movie. Indeed, Damian’s singing voice, when it’s not Borden, is actually that of King Kobra’s Marcie Free. Plus, right there on the LP’s A-side, you’ll find a pre-fame…Bang Tango? Yeah, okay, I guess there’s Bang Tango.
Naturally, as any Bang Tango mention often does, that begs some what-ifs.16 For instance, what if Metal Blade, deep into a 1988 release and reissue spree, plopped a Liege Lord or Sacrifice or Slayer or Candlemass song on the soundtrack among the half-empty hairspray bottles? Does that change anything about the movie? Does it make it slightly more, I don’t know, threatening? Or, is it kind of perfect that the Evil Dude would actually be into L.A. Strip shlock? Hell, could you even make a movie like this today, one where the devil is hiding in plain sight…in music? Does anyone even fear music like they supposedly did during the Satanic Panic?
Wellington is not so sure. “It’s weird. In pop culture, metal seems to regularly be associated with dangerous loners, so that’s pretty scary. But I don’t really think metal is the music of the youth anymore. If Damian were to show up in the modern world and start making music to ensorcell kids, I think he’d pick a style of music more popular. Like, trap or something. That’s a popular thing, right?” Uh…paging Tom, I need assistance in the Black Market aisle.
But yeah, I think that is why there’s a dearth of truly metal horror movies. Despite horror and metal being inextricably linked, it’s hard to say that metal has made as big of an impact on its big screen counterpart. Whole labels like Razorback Records exist to release the forever-growing horde of horror-inspired albums such as Engorged’s Where Monsters Dwell (which, excuse me as I explode into dust, is 14 years old now). There’s not really a movie production studio equivalent yet. Once heavy metal of the pop variety left the zeitgeist, horror movies with metallic touchstones more tangible than the occasional song were infrequent, and even those that were around before the fall feel pretty one-way in the information transfer.
Of course, I watch, like, three movies a year, so what the hell do I know.17 After all, Mike McPadden did write an entire book about heavy metal horror movies.18 So, sure enough, Wellington, who doesn’t think the connection is that uncommon, was quick to dunk on me with plenty of exceptions. “The other big one from the ’80s is Trick Or Treat, which features a bunch of Fastway tunes on the soundtrack, plus appearances by Ozzy and Gene Simmons. There’s the Gate, where the kids open a portal to hell by playing a metal record backwards. And then, recently, there’s the New Zealand horror comedy, Deathgasm, which is fun and super gory, and also features a ton of great bands on the soundtrack.” And if the latter is too over-the-top, he offered another lane: “A few years ago, there was a well-regarded horror flick called the Devil’s Candy, about a killer who plays metal riffs to drown out the voices in his head.”19
Fair. However, you might now recall my weaselly, not-quite-SEO-ready line from up top where I call Black Roses “maybe the most metal of the ’80s heavy metal horror movies.” I heroically stand by that maybe. While Trick Or Treat and the Gate are better movies, and I’m sure I’ll be writing about both at some point, they’re missing a certain je ne sais blargh that is inherent in the Black Roses experience.20
Part of that can be found by exploring the intersection between subterranean metalheads and B-movie addicts. “I think fans of both appreciate niche media, seeking out pop culture that isn’t readily available,” Wellington pointed out. “There’s a feeling of being in a special club. Being familiar with a specific little-seen movie is very similar to having listened to some rare metal record. Plus, most B-horror movies and some of the more extreme heavy metal both push the limits of what the general public would consider to be ‘good taste.'” There’s also how metal and B-movies subtly congratulate fans for acquiring the right metadata to decrypt messages that often threatened outsiders will never unscramble.
To that end: True, on the surface, it’s not like Black Roses is super-duper metal. Like, you’re not going to find a Celtic Frost concert hidden within the cigarette burns. And it even feels, dare I say, demeaning. Ah, but then again, there’s the hidden genius of Cirile’s script. Trick Or Treat may have metal feels, the Gate metal special effects, but, thanks to Cirile, Black Roses deploys subtext in a metal sort of way. It’s not something you pick up on during your first screening, mainly because you’re probably laughing too hard. But…did you notice that the movie’s villain isn’t actually heavy metal? Rewind it back and keep a close eye on the authority figures. To make that subtext text, here’s a crucial exchange between Mr. Brain Hammer and Fasano:
BH: Is Black Roses meant to be a cautionary tale warning parents about the dangers of metal?
JF: Ha! It’s about MONSTER[S] killing bad parents! Pay attention to your kids or you’ll die!
Stuff like that makes me think that the reason Black Roses feels so metal is because of the people behind the movie. Take Fasano: This guy had a second career as a screenwriter, breaking out with 1990’s Another 48 Hours. From there…welp, it would appear that he got gobbled up by the system, getting screwed out of credits galore including Alien 3.21 Still, he made one of those real Hollywood careers out of opportunities that weren’t exactly critically lauded, but you work with what you get. In interviews, it’s easy to see him as a lifer, in it for the love of making stuff even if he wasn’t necessarily loved back. He passed in 2014. He was 52.
That sort of conviction, of sacrificing normality to feed an insatiable internal hell beast hungry for atypical and alienating creative pursuits, is pretty metal. I guess you could say he was…fuck me, I’m going to write it…FOR REEEEEAAAAL.22
Arguably the funniest first line to a column. I know you shouldn’t laugh at your own jokes, but this still gets me. I think I even had a friend in the entertainment biz fact check this for me to make sure the formatting was correct.
This was the first column published after the Amorphis debacle, and you can tell I needed to write the shit out of this one to restore my own sanity. For more on the Black “Black Winter Day” Day, please refer to the last ever Black Market.
There it is. Can’t even let my own sleeping dogs lie.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading through Adam West’s sexcapades that rival the legend of Wilt Chamberlain. I have a hard time believing my guy was getting that busy, but he did look good in the bat suit.
Can’t even tell you what this is referencing now. I thought it might be Wayne’s World, but Carrere’s band in that is Crucial Taunt. If you know, let me know.
Thor is one of those metal characters I was meaning to write a column about but never got around to it. I think he was also a little overexposed for our purposes. There’s a link in the next graf to the whole muscle rock thing if you’re curious.
Cue Kool-Aid Man.
Pretty sure I couldn’t get Fasano on the phone, so this became a write-around. Whenever there’s enough good tape from someone scattered around the web, I don’t feel too bad about doing that. I still feel like you need to at least make the interview attempt, though. My general policy is that if I’m going to mention you, I should at least try to talk to you.
There’s way, way more about this in the Piledriver piece, which will get annotated sometime next year.
Take that, Trump administration. Glad we’re done with that part of history.
Hate that this joke has endured. Hate. HATE. This was back when I was listening to the Coin Talk podcast, which was the funniest pro-coin pod that made sure you never wanted to invest in coins.
What’s up, Stuart? Halfway through the intro. Nice to see you out of nowhere. Really would’ve been nice if a writer said you were in the building.
Christ, a Tooth and Nail dig.
We need to start a counter tracking how many times Wyatt’s “Metal Law” series is referenced.
I’m pretty sure I’m solely responsible for keeping the word “bedecked” alive.
The Bang Tango documentary! Man, this intro had it all. Every time I use a clip of the Bang Tango documentary in a podcast, I have to normalize the audio. It’s to the point where I want to ask the director if I can remix the movie.
Per my Letterboxd, I watched 265 this year. Some things don’t stay the same.
I think I got this from a publicist. I remember reading it for this very intro and used zilch of it. It do be like that sometimes.
I hit two out of the four in future columns. Laugh all you want at my laziness. That hit rate would put me in the hall of fame.
Trick or Treat absolutely is not a better movie.
I remember there being a whole graf about Alien 3 that we cut for space. Wood planet, the whole thing.
At least I recognized this was a garbage kicker.