Failed rock musician Brodie finds himself washed-up, broke, and stuck in small-town purgatory. But when he learns that ‘NoizeQuest’, a battle-of-the-bands competition is coming to his town, he sees a shot at redemption – and maybe even a second chance with his lost love, Medina. One problem: his drummer is missing an arm, and the rest of his band is, well… dead. Luckily, Brodie still has the pages of The Black Hymn, so raising his bandmates from the great beyond is just a riff away. But with every chord comes blood, guts, and the kind of apocalyptic chaos only DEATHGASM can unleash.
A full decade after the original DEATHGASM, Jason Lei Howden’s long awaited, much anticipated sequel gleefully turns everything up way past eleven; amping up the garish gore, the obnoxious attitudes, the in-your-face outrageousness, the wilfully juvenile toilet humour and, of course, the music. Subtle it ain’t; it’s a film that slaps the sensitive and laughs right in the face of so-called sophisticates. And yet, for all its broadness and boorishness, its cartoonishly confrontational excesses, the fact that this film comes so long after the original gives it an unexpected core of sorrow, of regret for lost time and lost youth. Though not much given to introspection or reflection, Brodie is a man living in the past, haunted by dead friends and thwarted musical ambition, refusing to grow. And because of this, because he does not know when to leave things well alone, he unleashes chaos and apocalypse. Again. In an odd way, he could be rather a tragic figure. If he wasn’t quite so addicted to knob jokes.