Detroit Metal City

As you may have guessed my good gentle readers, I tend to keep an eye on the pulse of japan (or is that an ear?) It can be bewildering at the best of times, special when it comes to music. Most of Japanese popular music is fairly easy to get. High pitched, cute (kawaii) ladies singing fairly nonsense songs of a light bubble gum fashion. Basically perfect for karoake or for the intro to some anime series. Example, Puffy Ami Yumi's theme for the teen titans:



Not everything is so light and fluffy though. One little side nook of japanese music is what happens with Death Metal and Glam Rock decide to have a baby together. It's not pretty. It's like Kiss on PCP with a sore throat.

"Detroit Metal City" is the adventures of our helpless hero in this world. All he wants to do is sing songs of love and puppies, and all that. By happenstance, though, he is now the dynamic front singer/demon for one of the most popular bands of this genre. Because he's in heavy make up no one guesses wussboy is Sir Krauss who claims to have a speed rape record. Can he keep his lives seperate? Of course, not it wouldn't be a comedy without wacky misunderstandings and quickly changing in and out of costume.

Wacky is as good description of this film as anything. With a side order of "good nature," which is suprising somewhat. It would be like if Adam Sandler had to pretend he was GG Alan. If I had one complaint it would be that wuss boy was too wussy squishy, sometimes the performance was so over the top it made me squirm and wish for the nuance of Rob Schneider. Still, an interesting film all and all.



And if you needed to scare your cats this morning here is a "classic" DMC song.