Director – Tim Connery (Black Web, Statler’s Tapes)
Starring – Alex Stein (Chicago P.D., The Last Shift), Grace Melon (Chicago Fire, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party), and Dan Flannery (Contagion, Empire)
Release Date – 2020
Rating – 3.5/5
Social media is a valuable resource for many horror fans. Fans of indie horror in particular have no real place to turn to for indie horror flicks but places like Facebook and Instagram is a great place to connect with other link minded horror fans. Over the years I’ve become friends with pr firms, horror artists, authors, filmmakers, producers, and so on. I find a lot of great movies through them and discover new movies almost daily.
A few days back artist Marc Schoenbach of Sadist Art shared his artwork for the horror comedy Death to Metal. Marc is one of my favorite artists and I usually jump on any film he has worked on so when I saw this poster I had to hunt the director down. Tim Connery, the man behind the film, was kind enough to send a link my way to check out. Thanks Tim!
**spoiler Alert** The film follows a priest who is very devout but during his youth found himself on the business end of a bullying from local metal heads. Now, as an adult, he has a mortal hatred for metal and anyone that listens to it. His hatred was so severe that after he suffered a mutilating accident he used his new found strength to murder the metal heads that were attending a concert. **Spoiler Alert**
Most horror fans that I know are metal heads. Metal and horror goes hand in hand and I’m hard pressed to find a horror fan that doesn’t like metal to some extent. What I find to be surprising about the entire horror and metal culture is that there is not enough horror movies centered around metal. Sure, there is some and a lot of indie horror films feature heavy soundtracks of unsigned metal bands but we don’t have nearly enough metal centered horror flicks. Death to Metal does a fantastic job at blending the standard slasher formular with a metal centric story. It works very well and really impressed me.
The acting in this one is pretty well done. The characters are very entertaining and the cast really gets int otheir roles. Some of the supporting cast does shoe their inexperience but the overall acting in the film was great. I really enjoyed Alex Stein and Grace Meon’s chemistry on screen. They worked very well together and their characters are very grounded.
The story for this one is a standard slasher tale mixed with horror the metal scene in most towns and cities. I really liked how Connery took the old slasher motif following someone that was wronged (the priest) who starts killing those that they feel had wronged them. The addition of the great metal soundtrack and the music scene really drives this one home for me. With that being said, I did not get enough of the killing. I really loved the theme around the killer and there just wasn’t enough of those scenes for me.
Finally, the film has several on screen deaths but not enough for my bloodlust. The kills we get make great use of the killer and the religious theme. The kills are gory and the practical effects are fucking amazing. The most hardcore slasher fans will really appreciate the deaths in this one. Overall, Death to Metal is a fucking must see for fans of slasher, bass blasting metal, and genre fans looking for a good time. This movie gets everything right and I can’t wait to fucking watch it again. God damn, it was so much fun!
