They’re too good to be true (or too awful) and sometimes they’re hilarious because they don’t need to inhabit the real world. Imaginary musicians, faux songs or flat-out spoofs, here are my favourite fake metal bands.
What’s next for the lowly werewolf?
Horror, like anything else, has its trends. Vampires have gone mainstream thanks to Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer; zombies are the new vampires, if 28 Days Later and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are any indication; and ghosts, while they haven’t made waves since movies such as The Sixth Sense and The Others more than ten years ago, are the only spooky creatures that people actually still believe in. Where, then, does that leave werewolves?
Metal Monday: Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City
One of the virtues of Chuck Klosterman’s take on 1980s heavy metal in Fargo Rock City is that, once you’ve read it, you’ll never look at metal the same way again.
Born and raised in Wyndmere, N.D., Klosterman had already covered music for the Fargo Forum and the Akron Beacon Journal before writing it, and has since gone o to write for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, as well as a number of bestselling books.
Werewolf Wednesday: David Wellington’s Frostbite
If revenge is a dish best served cold, then what better place for it than the Canadian North? In the bizarre landscape of the Arctic’s “drunken forest” and forsaken settlements such as Port Radium, David Wellington crafts an intriguing, original take on the werewolf mythos in Frostbite.
Wellington had already shown his taste for revamping classic monsters, in novels such as Vampire Zero and 13 Bullets. In Frostbite, he makes the rules for his lycanthropes all the more strict and frightening, while at the same time presenting a very human story.
Metal Monday: KISS’s Destroyer (Resurrected)
Downloading KISS’s Destroyer (Resurrected) marks the fourth time in my life I’ve paid full price for this album, but the first time I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Destroyer is the album every other studio effort by the band is measured. Given Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley’s penchant for self-hype, it’s become something of a tradition for them to claim about each new album that it’s their “best one since Destroyer.” (I can’t think of a time when that’s been true, though Love Gun certainly comes close.)
Feature Friday: Jón Gustafsson’s Wrath of Gods
Filmmaking is never easy. But when a perfect storm of financial and weather trouble hit Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, the production took on a heroic scale that rivalled the plot of the movie itself. Jón Gustafsson brought it to life in his documentary Wrath of Gods.
Terry Gilliam once attempted to film an adaptation of Don Quixote. It was a notoriously difficult shoot. Lead actor Jean Rochefort suffered an injury that removed him from the production and floods destroyed sets and equipment, among other problems. The film was never finished — though it became the subject of a famous documentary, Lost in La Mancha.
Sturla Gunnarsson may know how Gilliam felt.
