1987

Brainscan's comments:

Rock n' Roll Nightmare is half truth in advertising, at least as far as titles are concerned.  It is a nightmare but the music in it is to real rock n' roll (Buddy Holly, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin) what Velveeta is to a fine, aged cheese.  Here's the backstory to the movie: there is this guy and he started off a bodybuilder but he could yell melodically into a microphone so he put together a hair band in the 80's and then did some work in a movie so he figured anyone could write a screenplay and star in it and he got someone to put up a few thousand dollars (Canadian, because this is a north of the border production) and hired a bunch of friends and spent a day or two, maybe three filming.  The result is bad enough to be watchable.  Really, it goes so far beyond atrocious it lands at laughable and that is worth the price of admission.  I read one on-line review that offered the opinion no one could have seen the plot-twist coming at the end, as though that were a good thing.  Imagine at the end of the Godfather it turned out Vito was the Archangel Gabriel, sent to earth to do battle with Lucifer, himself.  No one would have seen that coming, either, because it would have been just so fucking stupid.  That's what Nightmare gives us.  And the archangel guys does battle with his shirt off because - I think I mentioned this - the lead actor/writer/singer used to be a bodybuilder and his hooters are bigger than those of most women in this fine cinematic achievement.  Okay, the exposure: 1) Jillian Peri in two scenes, shows us the only pair of hooties bigger than the lead actor's; 2) Teresa Simpson (the only legit actress in the bunch) wears a see-through nightie in one scene, takes off her top in another and then transitions into the shower with the lead actor/body builder/writer/singer; 3) Denise Decandia sport humps this guy but she must have had a no-nipples agreement because they remain hidden by every means available.  I should also mention that four women show up as groupies and in the bunch are two women who have done a lot of work in front of the camera and in back of it.  They are Lara Daans and Carrie Schiffler.  Sad to say, these are the most prudish rock groupies ever and no one shows any skin.  That has a certain symmetry to it: lame band, lame groupies.

Tuna also reviewed this film some years ago. His comments:

Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, aka The Edge of Hell, is a low budget Canadian horror offering written by and starring Jon-Mikl Thor, who claims in a DVD special introduction that it is a cult classic with a huge fan base. Comments at IMDb do tend to support this claim, but Thor glossed over the reason why his film is so beloved. All of the appreciative fans love the fact that it is so bad it is good

The apparent plot is as follows:

A family is devoured in their house by an oven creature. Ten years later, we follow a van on the highway for ten minutes of screen time to find out that a heavy metal 80s hair band called Tritonz has rented the oven creature's abode to rehearse and record their next album free of distractions. Well, free of most distractions. They do bring their girl friends with them. Hey, they're rock stars. The band's leader is named John Triton, who is played by none other than the film's author, Jon-Mikl Thor. No sooner do the rockers take up quarters in the house than they start to get killed off by hand puppets - beginning with any women that show their breasts. Whoa. Turns out the oven creature was actually an oven mitt.

I said "apparent" plot because we learn after seventy minutes of such goings-on that nothing we have seen was real, and that Triton/Thor is actually an archangel who is battling Satan, who in turn has craftily used all of his resources to take on the exact appearance of the plastic Satan which pops out at people from every carnival's ghost train.

Why was Triton looking for Satan at that location? Who would ever have expected Satan to live in a run-down farmhouse in the Toronto area? Only an archangel can sense these things.
 
Unfortunately the $53,000 budget could not allow for an actual actor to wear the Satan costume, so Triton/Thor actually does battle with the Satan costume itself, all the while pretending that it is fighting back, in the manner of Bela Lugosi battling the rubber octopus in Bride of the Monster.

I think you can spot the weaknesses of that plot without further evaluation from me. In case you choose to watch the film, you might notice that the poor writing is compounded by many other liabilities. Nobody in the film can act, the editing is not tight, the hand puppets are simply silly, there isn't nearly enough nudity, the heavy metal music is grating, and the gore is amateuris

Scoop's notes from 2005:


"I'll see you again, Old Scratch."

- the final words of Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare

* Fans will be glad to know that Rock 'n Roll Nightmare finally has a sequel - a brand-new 2005 sequel. Jon Mikl Thor didn't write the sequel, but he produced it and acted in the title role. Oh, sure, you had to wait eighteen years until Triton could keep his word and see Old Scratch again, but I'm sure it must have been worth it to see The Intercessor: Another Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare. Actually, I'm just going to have to leave that as an assumption, since I have no intention of seeing the sequel. This one is rated 1.8 at IMDb, compared to 2.8 for the original. But I won't say I'm not curious.

* John Mikl Thor has IMDb credits in the 1986-1987 period, and then again between 2003 and 2005. Not one single credit in the fifteen years in between. Can it be any coincidence that the traditional battle time between Satan and a good angel is exactly fifteen Earth years? I think not.

* Ya gotta love a movie in which one of the lead characters is named Roger Eburt.

* And you thought the monsters in Alien were scary?

Based our normal scale, this film is a C-, with the genre being "entertainingly bad movies." It is the Citizen Kane of Evil Oven Mitt movies. If the genre is limited to "horror," the score is farther along in the alphabet. In fact, I'm not certain it can be encompassed within the mere 26 letters of the English alphabet. How many letters do they have in Russian? It's down somewhere near Я.

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Enough chit-chat. Here's THE NUDITY.

Denise Dicandia film clip (collage below)



Jillian Peri film clip (collage below)



Teresa Simpson film clip (collage below)