Heavy Metal Horror Comedy Goes Over-The-Top, Stream Now

With its hilariously provocative name, just what is Deathgasm really about? It’s about two metal-loving teens who form a band, but before they can perfect their sound, they get caught in the crosshairs of crazy cultists in search of some music that can summon demons. Throw a little love triangle into the mix and you have a potent tale of love, death, betrayal, and a whole lot of metal.

The cast of Deathgasm is great, though most horror fans won’t readily recognize all the actors in this New Zealand film. One of our leads is played by Milo Cawthorne, an actor arguably best known for his role in the TV show Power Rangers RPM (though we loved him in the film Guns Akimbo). The female lead is played by Kimberley Frances Crossman, best known for starring in the soap opera Shortland Street which also featured her Deathgasm colleague Andrew Laing.

Notably, Deathgasm is the directorial debut of Jason Lei Howden, a visual effects maestro who has worked on the MCU, the DCEU, and all three of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies. These days, he is better known for directing Guns Akimbo, the film that brought us all those delightful memes of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe being heavily (and forcibly) armed.

However, I would argue that Deathgasm is ultimately the stronger film, one which executes a simple premise very well while delivering visual effects so cool they could have been on a heavy metal album cover.

When Deathgasm came out, it was a critical darling, something exceedingly rare for the horror genre. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently has a critical rating of 88 percent, with critics praising how the movie “plumbs the blood-spattered depths of grindhouse gore with enough giddy glee to satisfy genre enthusiasts looking for a thrill.” Pretty much everyone loves Deathgasm except for the retailer Walmart, who refused to sell the movie until they could swap out its raunchy title for the more family-friendly name Heavy Metal Apocalypse.

This killer reception made a Deathgasm sequel inevitable, but the wait for it has been as long and as excruciating as the wait for another decent Metallica album (signed, a true 72 Seasons hater). Howden announced Deathgasm Part 2: Goremageddon back in 2015 and promised it would have more of the titular gore in the first 10 minutes than the entirety of the previous film.

A Kickstarter to help fund the sequel was finally launched last year, and while it made more than its goal (Howden was asking for $300,000 and got $325,554), its eventual release date remains unknown.

What remains very known, though, is my profound love for the first Deathgasm: the movie is a very earnest love letter to both horror and heavy metal, and it joins those worlds together perfectly. The cast may not be full of household names, but each actor perfectly embodies their characters in this off-kilter world and helps sell us on the bonkers plot. And it’s hard not to grin at the premise of a movie where a profound love of music is all it takes to get the girl and maybe even save the world.

GFR SCORE

Will you find Deathgasm as brutal (you gotta say it in your best Metalocalypse voice) and entertaining as I did, or would you rather sell your soul to a demon than watch it a second time? You won’t know, of course, until you stream it for yourself on Tubi, Plex, or Prime Video. Afterward, you may never look at music or monsters the same way again.