Detroit Rock City

Detroit Rock City opens with a comic vignette about an uptight, chainsmoking mom who's preparing to relax with a nice stiff drink and a little Donny and Marie. Just down the street in this particular 1970s suburb, as we'll soon discover, her stoned son is belting out "Shout It Out Loud" with the neighborhood Kiss cover band. Mom picks out an LP, carefully slides the vinyl from the paper sleeve, and places the album on the turntable before settling back into a recliner. Even if you don't happen to notice the Casablanca label on the album she's chosen, you'll see this slapstick gag coming from a mile away -- someone's hidden a Kiss album (Love Gun) in her Donny and Marie jacket.

They do make horror films that start out like this. And very occasionally they even make clever comedies that begin this way (Ferris Bueller's Day Off). Detroit Rock City is neither. It would certainly be giving the film too much credit to call it willfully idiotic, yet no one involved, except perhaps the members of Kiss themselves, seems to have taken the project too seriously. And so the four hapless teens stumble inevitably forward, from one moronic gag to the next, on their way to the big Kiss-concert finale. The result isn't quite as terrible as it probably should be, but wouldn't a simple Kiss concert film have made a lot more sense?

-- Matt Ashare