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| Directed by Adam Rifkin; Starring Edward Furlong, Sam Huntington, James DeBello, Giuseppe Andrews, Natasha Lyonne, Lin Shaye, Melanie Lynskey, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss |
I’ve now seen 105 films for the 1999 film year and it is getting to where it becomes a tougher time to become a “best of” or “worst of” as there are many more competitors. It slowly becomes a rarity that I say “I have not seen a better film this year” but it still happens (that phrase was recently used only four weeks ago with Eyes Wide Shut). Where Eyes Wide Shut became the best of the year, Detroit Rock City gets to be its worst of the year counterpart.
I guess that it would be best for me to admit that I am not a fan of the seventies rock band Kiss, whose fans are the subjects of this film. They just never really worked for me, does that make me a “Guido”? I don’t know. Still I think that my lack of gratitude to the directors for making a film that would reach me did not make me look down on the film anymore than I would if I was a die-hard fan of the band. It is the worst looking mess I’ve seen in years. I heard one person say that they liked the film because every part of the film had some directorial touch that is unusual in most films. That aspect did not make me like the film, instead it gave me a terrible headache.
Detroit Rock City is about the things that happen to four friends as they set out to see Kiss in concert in Detroit. After one friend’s, Jem (Huntington), bible belt Catholic mother (Shaye; how could she do this after There’s Something About Mary?) burns their tickets because she believes that the band stands for “Knights in Satan’s Service”, the four must come up with a new way to get tickets. Next thing we know, they are breaking Jem out of boarding school and heading to the concert. There they find the trouble that can occur when trying to get tickets on the evening of the show. Each friend sets out on his own and gets into his own cut of trouble.
The film is an annoying look at why films set in the seventies should be banned for a few years (not even the neo-classic Boogie Nights can make me forget sitting through all this dreck set in the seventies). I did not like the characters and I couldn’t have cared less what happens to them. When one of them (DeBello) is in the middle of a armed robbery, I was actually hoping that he would be taken out of the film by the stick-up man. I’d feel fine saying that this is easily the most technically unimpressive films of the year and the worst film over all.
