'Death Metal Zombies' Is A Death Metal Movie
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on October 2022.
Let me borrow the pacing of a horror movie with rental store ambitions made on a shoestring budget and skip the exposition. I want to jump right into my favorite bit of acting in Death Metal Zombies, a super campy shot-on-video (SOV) feature directed by Todd Jason Falcon Cook and released straight to VHS in 1995. Here we go.
“Unbelievable,” Johnny (Milton Rush) crows, “you call yourself a metalhead and you haven’t heard Bloodgate yet?” Johnny bellows this with the self-assuredness of a wrestling heel cutting a promo. Truly, gatekeeperism is the real zombie infection. And, you bet, the salvo reeks of the desperation of someone who always needs to be regarded as the sickest. “Sorry,” a chagrined Tony (played by Cook, the director) responds. But here’s the thing: Instead of matching the shame of his voice, Tony’s movements are a perfect passive-aggressive return volley. His shrug diffuses the intended pose-exposed putdown, neutering the petty attempt at domination through discography.
Needless to say, I love that. Is the acting good in a technical, traditional sense? No. Have I lived this scene in all its awkwardness? Absolutely. So, you got me, Death Metal Zombies. Sign me up for Team Tony. Hell, it even inspired me to look it up in Encyclopaedia Metallum: Bloodgate didn’t exist until Cincinnati’s Bloodgate surfaced in 2016. Ah ha! Take that, Johnny. Begone, false bully. Me and Tony are going to listen to Pierced From Within.1 Wait, you like Suffocation, right, Tony? Don’t be a poseur, Tony.
Death Metal Zombies‘s heavy metal pandering is a bullseye for a mark like me. That’s what the ramshackle feature has going for it more than anything else. What it lacks in the normal things normal people want out of movies, such as plot coherence, competent directing, and good acting, it makes up for with winking nods to metal and horror that can be as inventive as their sources. And, most importantly, its soundtrack is stuffed with Relapse Record’s mid-’90s finest: Amorphis, Brutality, Deceased, Disembowelment, Dismember, Hypocrisy, Incantation, Mortician, Pungent Stench, Winter, and more. Sure, out of all the metal movies I’ve covered over the past five years, Black Roses, Trick or Treat, The Gate, and Opera, Death Metal Zombies isn’t the best.2 But, if you’re a metalhead, you might get the most out of it, especially if it’s also your introduction to the gonzo world of SOV, a very extreme metal-esque style of cinema. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We have a movie to break down.
A big gory chunk of Death Metal Zombies tells the tale of suburban metalheads. They hang out, go to shows, and get into inexplicably violent rumbles in the woods with rival metal crews as if it’s 1993 Norway. The group’s leader is Brad Masters (Bill DeWild), a gentle oblivious burnout whose only established character trait is that he loves playing out albums…to death. When Brad learns his favorite band, Living Corpse, is releasing a rare tape via a radio contest that will include an exclusive song, he’s stoked. A song only he’d possess? What more could a tape dork wish for in the pre-Fiadh Productions age? He enters, beats out Martin Shkreli, and wins. He plans to premiere the new ripper for his friends at a garage get-together. Angel (Lisa Cook), his girlfriend, misses the party because she has to work late at her office job due to the demands of her “pusswad” boss. In a plot twist straight out of a small business tyrant’s wet dream, Angel’s enforced OT saves her. It turns out anyone who hears the song is impressed into the zombie army of Shengar, Living Corpse’s lead singer, who has a Beelzebubian aura.3 With her friends now under Shengar’s spell, Angel, the final girl, must find a way to reverse the curse.
Is that Death Metal Zombies‘s only story? Of course not. It also features a purposely underexplained B-plot about a slasher murdering their way through town in a Richard Nixon mask. Indeed, with the same multi-hyphenate zeal of a newly created metal genre, Death Metal Zombies is a zombie slasher movie, as if a drive-in theater projectionist accidentally spliced together Return of the Living Dead and Friday the 13th. And to understand why the film bounces between these styles, you have to know a little about the movie’s director, Todd Jason Falcon Cook.
“In 1980, after watching the original Friday the 13th, I grabbed my dad’s Super 8 film camera and started filming and making my own Friday the 13th-style home movies by myself and with my friends,” Cook said to Daily Grindhouse.4 When an adolescent Cook caught the Jason bug, it was all horror movies, all the time. Initially, acting was the goal. He picked up filmmaking to help realize that dream. According to Cook, as told in the documentary series SOV The True Independents, his parents encouraged his creativity, although his mom “rolled her eyes at the fact I was squirting ketchup on the ceiling every few minutes to make a film.” But the budding director took the messes seriously, learning the tricks of the trade and adopting a What Would Tom Savini Do approach. Soon enough, armed with a camcorder, he was ready to shoot his first feature-length film.
“In 1989, I wrote Friday the 13th Part 13,” Cook told Retro Slashers. “Then I went right into making it happen! I directed, acted in, did special FX, scored, edited, and recruited all of my friends to be victims and my best friend at that time played the survivor. It took a year and a half and lots of reshoots of the climactic finale (which involved fire, four hockey-masked killers, and all-out practical FX). It was sometimes a challenge, but when it was done and shown around, it was an amazing feeling…especially having my first feature done at 18 years old!”
More shot-on-video fan films followed, including another hack at the Friday the 13th franchise, this one a proposed Part IX that was filmed years before Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday went into production. And then, it was time to work on an original.
On paper, 1992’s Evil Night is like one of those “spot the difference” picture games compared to Death Metal Zombies. It pairs a bullied-becoming-the-bully slasher with a zombie ending. Similarly, its stilted acting and editing give it a real dream-within-a-dream quality, the horror movie they watch in horror movies, that’s the butter zone for bad movie fanatics. But it’s also packed with ideas, repurposing the twists and turns and masks of many cult horror films for its own awesomely goofball ends.
“The inspiration for Evil Night was pure camp horror films,” Cook recalled. “Specifically Slaughter High, Carrie, and Friday the 13th. I was a huge fan of camp and B-films like Ghoul School, Boardinghouse, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Blood Lake, Slaughter High (‘From the Makers of Friday the 13th‘), etc. I had also seen other SOV films coming out, and I was already doing them since 1984, not even knowing that SOV was going to become a recognized style of filmmaking. It just seemed natural to go ahead and shoot on the format I had been using.”
SOV is not only a recognized style of filmmaking these days but is undergoing a renaissance thanks to the efforts of many schlock archaeologists. Richard Mogg’s book Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995 was published in 2018. Annie Choi, Zack Carlson, and Joseph A. Ziemba’s Bleeding Skull!: A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey came out last year. (Bleeding Skull, the website, has been covering this stuff forever. I’ll be citing it frequently.) Alongside these deep dives has been a reissue effort to get these movies into the hands of obsessives who live for the uninhibited thrills of outsider art. And yeah, some of these movies are art and have broken through to a broader audience. Video artist Cecelia Condit’s 12-minute Possibly In Michigan, “a musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a cannibal named Arthur,” per the artist, cracked Bleeding Skull‘s top 10 best shot-on-video films. It also made the rounds on TikTok. The YouTube upload currently sits a few views shy of seven million.
But the SOV tradition to which Evil Night belongs typically had different aims because its makers knew they weren’t making masterpieces. Cook to Retro Slasher: “I wanted the film to be fun, campy, and entertaining without trying to be more than it is.” If you believe in SOV’s purity, that’s a good credo. But one can’t ignore that another side of SOV was a calculated move to turn a profit in a burgeoning industry: the video rental store.5
Following George Atkinson and the Video Station breaking ground for video rentals in the US, rental stores soon realized they had an inventory problem and needed to stock shelves. The answer was provided by enterprising producers wanting to turn a quick buck. Celluloid? Expensive. Shoot it on video. Genre? Horror. The level of quality its fans will accept is more, uh, negotiable.
Early SOV antecedents such as the unhinged 1982 Boardinghouse, which received a limited theatrical release after being transferred to film, and David A. Prior’s 1983 lower-than-low budget Sledgehammer, which was direct-to-video, were pioneers in this new wild west. But, according to Ziemba’s “From Betacam To Big Box: Shot-On-Video Trash In The 1980s,” 1985’s Blood Cult was “billed as ‘The first movie made for the home video market’ by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.” With a budget of $27,000, and an advertising account likely much higher, the movie became a hit for United Entertainment Pictures and set the template: shoot quickly and cheaply and slap on a sensationalistic video cover to catch the eye of renters.
By 1992, the video market was overflowing with carny attempts to cash in. But it also provided less cynical DIY filmmakers a way to get their work out there.
“When I shot Evil Night, I absolutely had distribution in mind,” Cook said to SOV The True Independents. “I had seen a few other shot-on-video horror films — I think Blood Lake, a few of the early ones like Boardinghouse, Iced, and some of those others. And I thought, Wow, that’s something I can do. But when I stepped back and looked at the final cut, even as a 19-year-old kid with a huge ego, I thought I probably wasn’t going to get anything, but let’s go for it. We sent it out to some of the biggest companies we could, like Academy Home Entertainment, Columbia Tristar, and even Warner Brothers, and I still have all of the rejection letters.”
Undaunted, Cook took distribution into his own hands. He bought ads in horror and creature kid magazines and hocked his wares. His companies? The Boneyard, Cemetary Cinema, and Horrorscope Films. (You can find most of Cook’s work via Screamtime Films today.) It was a success. And as the operation grew, these companies started picking up other SOV fare from filmmakers like Kevin Lindenmuth and Chris Seaver. Suffice it to say, because Cook hustled up these distribution channels, Evil Night wasn’t entombed within his camcorder. It was released, found fans, and garnered a cult reputation. Even today, it’s debatably Cook’s best-known horror movie. Is it his most significant contribution to culture, though? Well, we’ll get to that.
In that spirit, I want to linger on Evil Night a little longer because, even though there are at least six other videos between this one and Death Metal Zombies, it sets the stage for the latter in two ways.
First, Evil Night reminds me of the early days of death metal in that there’s a sense that Cook is making it up as he goes, allowing his creativity to fill the gaps in his budget and know-how. That creativity is born from a fan’s intense desire to make something for himself that meets the high-water mark of their own taste. It’s an intractable impulse, driving the ambitions to overcome the deficits in ability. And Cook is committed to make it work. That gives the movie a quirky kineticism as he tries to up the ante and deliver gags that only horror movie lifers with his encyclopedic knowledge would get. In turn, he creates his own visual language that’s heavily referential but pushed to extremes. Also, like death metal, most people I talk to think it’s terrible. It only connects with a certain type of sicko.
(As I am eternally on the fake-band beat, I am compelled to note that Evil Night has a pseudo-metal soundtrack. Per Bleeding Skull, the two credited bands, Stage Dive and Nytemayre, were fakes of Cook’s making and sound “like an unwanted basement collaboration between Depeche Mode and Megadeth.” Quite the super collision. Don’t get any ideas, Mustaine.)
Second, Evil Night is where Cook met Lisa Forbes, who would soon become horror princess Lisa Cook. “Lisa was one of hundreds of actors seen at an all-day audition for Evil Night,” Cook said to Retro Slashers. “We had placed ads in the paper and got an overwhelming response so we took a couple of days to hold auditions in order to select our finals. Lisa was selected for the role of Shannon in Evil Night. We hit it off and worked well together and eventually tied the knot and continued to make films together.”
The two quickly bonded over shared interests. “Lisa was a huge Linnea Quigley fan (as was I) and she loved the campy style B-horror films as well, so it was natural to work toward the goal of solidifying my brand of camp horror with a familiar face in each film,” Cook remembered. “She had the ambition and energy to do many films with me so I wrote and directed as much as I could between 1992-1998. We did several films a year and appeared at conventions over the years.” (The Cooks split in the 2000s. Lisa’s IMDB profile states that she’s now married to Death Metal Zombies‘s co-star Bill DeWild.)
Quick aside: One of the couple’s many collaborations is 1994’s Lisa Cook’s Deadly Workout, a take on Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout, itself a parody of the Jane Fonda workout tapes. Quigley’s is worth a watch. The B-queen’s humor permeates a lot of the Cooks’ work. And you haven’t lived until you see Quigley convincing a horde of zombies to do synchronized aerobics, so here’s that:
Anyway, Evil Night set Cook up with a style and a star. So what set Death Metal Zombies in motion? Fittingly, like the zombified characters in the movie he’d soon write, it was a song that Cook couldn’t get out of his head.
“The concept came out of the fact that death metal was becoming big in the early to mid-’90s,” Cook revealed about Death Metal Zombies‘s genesis during an IndieHorror.TV Q&A. “I found a CD by a band called Dead World. Never heard of the band, but the cover looked cool, so I bought it. There was one track on there that captivated me for whatever reason. I thought, I’m going to make a zombie film just because of this song.”
While Cook had a direction, the title was a work in progress. “I was going to call it Heavy Metal Zombies. Very cheesy, of course, because I love doing the camp comedy horror thing. And I had seen a movie called Hard Rock Zombies. So, it was sort of like, ‘Let’s take that a step further.’ But then I decided to focus on death metal music, and I am glad I did. I think the title Death Metal Zombies gets more recognition than Heavy Metal Zombies would have. It’s really interesting that a lot of people who have seen Death Metal Zombies say their favorite thing about it is the soundtrack.” …is it, though?
Death Metal Zombies started filming in August 1994. It was a good time to make a movie about death metal. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective introduced a legion of kids to Cannibal Corpse. Later that year, Bolt Thrower popped up on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. (Good movie!) And, in 1995, Napalm Death’s “Twist the Knife (Slowly)” would appear on the Mortal Kombat soundtrack. (It belongs in a different discussion than these three box office moneymakers, but 1994’s direct-to-video Night of the Demons 2 contains two Morbid Angel songs.) Death metal was threatening to make a mark on mainstream movies. And it wasn’t just movies. Carcass had signed with Columbia Records. The Florida death metal bands were moving units. It was a canny move to tether a flick to a music style on the precipice of a breakout during its innovative salad days.
Naturally, given the popular heavies walking the land, the band that got Death Metal Zombies out of the grave and shambling along was…Dead World? Unbelievable. You don’t know Dead World? I don’t think you’re alone. The relatively tiny number of ratings on the industrial-leaning death metal band’s RateYourMusic page suggests that Dead World isn’t as recognized as its Relapse compadres that would become canonized as legends. Its 1993 full-length, The Machine, released in the US on the equally forgotten Release Entertainment, a Relapse imprint mainly devoted to noise and experimental records, probably deserves better than that fate. (While we’re on the topic of Release releases, Namanax, the great and sadly forgotten project of Bill Yurkiewicz, James Plotkin, and Kipp Johnson also deserves better. Repress it, please? Yes, this is what I choose to do with my platform. Send me to list-maker jail. I’m coming, Aaron.)6 Regardless of its diminished legacy, Dead World served its purpose. It made it to Cook and clicked into place like the Lament Configuration, releasing the rest of Relapse’s roster across the soundtrack.
So, how did that partnership come to be? If I had to guess, Dead World provided an entry point, and Relapse, whose co-founder Bill Yurkiewicz is thanked in the credits, opened up its already brimming larder of quality metal to Cook. (I reached out to everyone about the hows and whys. Dead World’s Jonathan Canady respectfully declined to comment. Canady laid Dead World to rest ages ago. He has a new experimental noise album out. It’s good. As for everyone else, by the time this column was published, no one had responded. I’ll update if anyone does.)7 And thus, Death Metal Zombies is blessed with this ridiculous, high-favorite-potential soundtrack that’s rife with classics and curios.
Let’s talk classics. As a death metal fan, watching a scene where a petty thief picks through her spoils while drinking a beer and rocking out to Brutality and Deceased is a thrill. It’s the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, except the music is over 25 years old. Considering how rare it is to get a metal movie with actual metal recorded by actual metal bands, this rules. What other movie is going to play you Amorphis and Dismember during its 90-minute runtime?
And, because Relapse wasn’t constrained to death metal, Death Metal Zombies isn’t either. Hearing Sweden’s Ozzy-never-left-Black-Sabbath doomers Count Raven is a delight. Less of a delight: Two Anal Cunt squalls report for duty. (“Radio Hit,” too, so that sucks. It’s the thing about the movie that has aged the worst.) But the non-AC selection of songs from the early era of one of extreme metal’s most enduring labels provides Death Metal Zombies a jukebox musical quality. It’s like Jersey Boys…if it had Disrupt tracks…and gut-chewing gore…and nudie shower scenes. Yeah, just like Jersey Boys.
That said, it’s the curios that ended up capturing my attention. Between the legends is the weird stuff, most of it not from the Relapse/Release vaults. Wicked Wayz’s “Good Day To Die” plays over a meet-the-gang montage that features the nudie shower scene mentioned above. That song is off the Colorado band’s 1994 full-length, Attitude Of Madness, an album so obscure that no one has uploaded it to YouTube. “Reminds me of Warrant- or Mötley Crüe-type material,” wrote user mkejec in a 2006 comment on Heavy Harmonies. We’ll have to take your word for it. In the context of the movie, surrounded by Relapse rippers, it sticks out like a sore thumb. But, hey, at least people remember it. Deep Six’s “Mechanical,” supposedly culled from a release titled Alone on Double Fist Records, doesn’t even have a Discogs listing.
And, yes, this wouldn’t be an October column unless I could puzzle over some fake bands. One is obvious: Living Corpse’s “Zombiefied (Black Morbid Death),” the inciting song that leads to zombification, is credited to Horrorscope Films. The other possibly-fake’s provenance is less clear. The credits music, “Angel and Tommy,” is performed by Gravy Day, “courtesy of Squished Bug Music.” That copyright leads back to a band named ratbastard that used to gig around Houston, Texas, one of the movie’s shooting locations. That’s as deep as I could go. Alas, the mystery endures.
Nevertheless, if your brain is wired in such a way that you’ll appreciate a good music reference, Death Metal Zombies is full of them. Metal merch, like t-shirts, posters, and stickers, abounds. And there’s more to spy than just metal. One unfortunate soul who sits on a knife and gets his heart punched out is wearing a Luke Records t-shirt that would probably fetch a pretty penny on today’s second-hand market. (Thanks to the cyclical nature of fashion, the Death Metal Zombies cast bedecked in mid-’90s clothes looks fashion-forward again.) And, as you’d expect, the only way to stop a death metal zombie is by playing country music. See, David Vincent knew.
The horror references are more obscure. The Tricky Dick-disguised slasher is a homage to Horror House On Highway Five, Richard Casey’s ultra-bizarre 1985 feature. Likewise, Todd Jason Falcon Cook’s Tony and Lisa Cook’s Angel lean into the detached-from-reality camp of their performances, evoking any number of fan-favorite B-flick characters that seem to be acting in a different movie than the one they’re in. Not to mention, the way Todd Jason Falcon Cook shoots the slasher stuff feels like he’s auditioning for the director’s chair of a future Friday the 13th installment.
So, what was in Todd Jason Falcon Cook’s future? After a few more years of making movies, he’d vacate that director’s chair for a new opportunity: skateboarding.
“What happened was I’ve been skateboarding my whole life,” Cook said to IndieHorror.TV. “I have this extreme drive and need to constantly be creative and original.” Friends pushed him to go pro, but Cook wasn’t interested. And yet, much like how his movies became cult classics, one of Cook’s skateboarding videos made it into the hands of a fan. “I guess one of my DVDs wound up at Tony Hawk’s company, and I started getting phone calls. Next thing I know, I’m wearing a clown suit on the cover of a magazine called Big Brother. From there, [Tony Hawk’s company] licensed an original trick of mine called the Falcon Slide….”
Sound familiar? If you’ve played Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, or any of the following games in the series, you’ve spent a brief moment inside Todd Jason Falcon Cook’s creative and original brain. Oh, right, the name. You’ve probably been wondering about the name this whole time. Cook: “I adopted ‘Falcon’ as a pro skateboarder to separate Todd Jason Cook, horror director, from Todd Falcon, pro skateboarder.” Now? It’s all one thing. Todd Jason Falcon Cook, the skateboarding horror director who makes zombie slashers. (You can find a DVD box set chronicling Cook’s skateboarding days at Toddfalcon.com.)
And, yep, after his skateboarding hiatus, Cook is back making movies. In 2009, the director and some of the cast of Death Metal Zombies reconvened to shoot Zombified, a less campy reimagining of the original. It was released in 2012. More projects soon followed, such as 2014’s Evil Night remake, directed by Chris Seaver, and the 2017 sequel Another Evil Night, helmed by Jason Harlow. According to IMDB, Cook, wearing the producer, executive producer, and/or writer hats, has two more films in production.
There you go. A slice of Death Metal Zombies and a smidgen of the absurdity of SOV movies. Any questions? OK. Yes, you in the back. What’s that? Is SOV a fitting analog for death metal? Eh, I’ll save you the tortured music-writer BS. I mean, you can figure it out. Wait, you can figure it out, right? Unbelievable. And you call yourself a metalhead?
Habitual winner of the Pierced from Within award.
The best is probably Opera, followed by The Gate.
I remember spending a good 15 minutes researching to make sure I was using “impressed” correctly. The things I did for that column.
I think if you can find at least five comprehensive interviews/profiles, you can hack a write-around pretty easily. My policy is always “if I talk about you, I’ll try to interview you,” but that doesn’t always happen on a deadline.
I like how this piece is just like, You know what? Forget metal. We’re diving into SOV.
lol, of course I make a plea for Namanax represses in here. A crack is a door if you want it to be.
No one did.