Metalheads: The Good, the Bad and the Evil

• Directed By: Bill Zebub
• Written By: Bill Zebub
• Country: USA
• Released: 2008
• Running Time: 82 Min
• Links: Official site
• Comedy, Exploitation, Reviews

Regardless of the music we listen to when we’re young, the lifestyle we affect or the subculture we identify with, most of us eventually grow up, get a sensible haircut and haul ourselves on to the 9 to 5 treadmill. But what if you don’t? What if you stay uncompromisingly true to your youthful values?

Meet Bill.

Bill (Bill Zebub) is metal all the way through. He has the attitude, the look, the girl. He has no job, no car and no money. And this inability to secure any sort of income is really beginning to grate on his girlfriend, Elaine (Emily Thomas). Although Elaine wants more than Bill is able to offer, he is available and not going anywhere so Elaine satisfies herself with the apparently safer option of lusting after Bills friend, Rich (Tom Goodwin) instead of risking making any real changes to her life.

And that pretty much sums the film up. Writer/director Bill Zebub doesn’t give us a huge amount of plot with Metalheads, preferring instead to allow us to simply spend time with the three main characters as they drift, aimlessly through their lives. What the film does manage to do very successfully, however, is bring these characters to life. It achieves this with both a very well observed script that accurately captures the cod-philosophical self-justifications of this collection of no-hopers and with a solid set of performances that manage to parody the the characters without descending into over-the-top silliness.

The film is more than a collection of scenes, however, and as the characters come to life, conflicts – both real and imagined – emerge and, while often trivial, these are enough to drive things forward and ensure that everything hangs together.

All of this makes for a film that is consistently funny. Metalheads is packed with jokes. And gratuitous nudity. And jokes about gratuitous nudity, many of which are laugh out loud funny. It’s a film that know what it wants to achieve and one approaches its subject matter with a real sense of fun. Not only you do get a real sense that the people behind it had a lot of fun making this film, but this sense of fun really does make it on to the screen.

Metalheads tries to do two things at once by affectionately mocking both the metalhead culture and the stereotypes that surround it. Although not all of the scenes work – and there is one scene near the end of the film that is jarringly unpleasant – the film as a whole does achieve its aims and manages to be very funny to boot. It also includes the funniest portrayal of drug-induced paranoia I have seen in a long time.