Anvil! The Story of Anvil :: A Movie Review

Before I even start with this review, let me say that the only Anvil song I know is "Metal on Metal" and up until last night, I thought it was by Raven. That's how off my radar these Canadian fuckheads were. Let me also say that this morning I downloaded their first 3 albums and they are actually pretty fucking rad. In a cheesy Canadian 80's metal band kinda way.

I've never written a movie review before, so I'm not sure what I'm doing here. Let me just say that if you like MI, you're gonna LOVE "Anvil!". The peeps that made it basically read MI and thought: "Shit, let's make a fucking movie! We'll find a has been band that never was and make fun of them like they do on that blog!" Well, gents, you've succeeded! 

I laughed, I cried (from laughing), and laughed again (mostly at the ridiculous Canadian accents). This documentary starts with an "Anvil primer", if you will. A short introduction to who Anvil were. Then they start to lay it on THICK. Too thick, actually. Scott Ian, Fuckhead Lars, Lemmy, Slash, Johnny Zazula and even Tom Araya go on to lie about how amazing Anvil were. It must look really convincing, but to those of us who know better, it's all a bunch of horseshit. Anvil sucked and were NOT this super influential band without whom Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and GnR would exist. That's just not true. Tygers of Pan Tang had more to do with 80's metal than Anvil, for fucks sake! I know the film makers had to make these guys seem interesting somehow, but give me a break! Playing guitar using a dildo does not make you a musical genius, it makes you a balding, aging sad, sad Canadian. If people really knew how lame a band they were, this movie would never had gotten the budget to be made and I would have spent last night alone, at home working on my yoga and watching reruns of House MD. Instead, I went to see this awesome movie and got some action afterwards. Looking at it from that perspective, I'm glad these dbags got their funding!

Anyway, after all the hype and bullshit,  we meet Robb Reiner (of course no relation to Rob Reiner, writer of "This is Spinal Tap"... it's just a weird, odd, weird, weird coincidence), and Lips, founders of Anvil. Their lives are obviously sad and pathetic. They remind me of the dude in The Wrestler. From that moment on I laughed for an hour straight. These clowns are SO FUCKING sad and pathetic that everything that comes out of their Canadian mouths is funny as shit. Add the accents and you have pure 100% 28K comedy gold. My stomach was hurting. I thought an usher would come and kick me out.

So they talk about how big they could have been and how their lives suck now, but  they catch a break and get to go on a pathetic European tour. This thing was booked by this ugly-ass broad who is totally incompetent and play in front of bartenders and tens of fans all over the old continent. At some fest in Sweden they get to meet all these "Metal celebrities" and not ONE of them know who the fuck they are. It's a non-stop laugh-a-thon! It's so well edited, they look like total chumps! 

Besides a drummer, Robb figures himself an 'artist'. Some of his work is actually not THAT bad, but he has a painting of a turd on a toilet that basically sums up Anvil's career. 

The movie ends with a show they play in Japan and like 10.000 people are there, so you'll leave the theater feeling all warm and cozy. The part they don't stress is that they were playing first on the bill. FIRST! 11:30am! The worst spot ever on a bill. The only reason people are there is because Japanese people are anally punctual and if the flyer says the show starts at 11am, they'll be there. But not to watch Anvil. They'll be there to watch the 10 other bands AFTER Anvil.

Japanese crowds are easily pleased. I know from experience. It's easy to convince these people that you are a legend. Do you know how much Japanese tail I've gotten by telling ladies I'm a BMX legend from Brazil who is touring Japan for Haro?

Some will tell you how "touching" Robb and Lip's friendship is. They'll say the movie is about their relationship that is almost like a brotherhood. They'll insist the movie triumphs because of their perseverance, love and dedication to the band or whatever... Take it from me, it's not!

There's nothing "touching" about these people. They are just sad, pathetic and HILARIOUS! I can't stress enough how pathetic and therefore funny this movie is. You HAVE to go see it and get some Anvil's music. If you like that raw almost thrashy metal from the 80's, these guys are pretty bad-ass.

Little did I know that after the credits rolled and the house lights came on, my night was just starting to get good. I was still wiping tears off my eyes when I saw a short, ugly girl get up two rows in front of us. "Eeew!" I thought, "she looks like a tiny troll!" Then it dawned on me: Ronnie James Motherfucking Dio was in the theater with me! Fuck yeah! I wonder what he thought of the movie. I wonder if he could even see the screen over the heads of the people sitting in front of them. I wonder if he realizes how short and ugly he is.

After that, my lady friend (best know by the acronym HSWG - "Hot Star Wars Girl") took me back to her place and did things to me. I wanna thank her for dragging me all the way down to The Angelika to watch this movie and for the sexual pleasures she blessed me with later on... What a night. What a fucking night!!

High School Memories

My senior picture, sans metal shirt. My mom told me to class it up and wear the bolo tie and southwestern shirt that day.

An ongoing discussion I have with my wife revolves around our high school memories. While her's are generally pleasant and memorable, mine are horrible and I try to forget them as much as I can. Much like a Vietnam vet who has flashbacks upon seeing a moving ceiling fan, I too have flashbacks whenever I even see a high school yearbook. Not really, but that story makes this post more poignant. The truth is that like most people who were into metal, school was not always fun for me (wah!, life was hard...wahhhhh!). I was a bit of an outcast, though largely by choice, now that I think about it. Like other metalheads, I didn't have the personality or looks that would have taken me to a higher level in the social pecking order, but my outcast status was mostly manufactured. I was a loser to some extent, but if I had simply chosen to listen to more popular music, and perhaps worn fewer metal shirts, I would have been a step above the kids with cerebral palsy. Those kids (CP kids) were the ones who really couldn't help themselves at all. Stupidly, I chose to wear Slayer shirts to school. I know that last sentence may be controversial in a metal forum such as this, but screw it. It's true.

In this post I will see how I would have measured up against some luminaries in the world of metal, had we attended school at the same time. In order to do research for this piece, I had to fire up the Nocturnus time machine. Normally, I don't use the time machine for just any ol' post, luckily gas prices have gone down, and we're now able to use such technology more freely. Don't complain about the fact that the pictures I'm using are not of the most obscure metal people on earth. Sorry, but high school pictures from the guys in Order From Chaos, Dorsal Atlantica and Sarcastic (they had a demo on Wild Rags) are not easy to come by.

Tom Araya

Tom was voted "class clown", which is weird, because I would have thought he'd be voted "most likely to end up looking exactly like Chief Sitting Bull." Seeing these pictures reminded me of a time at a Milwakee Metal Fest in 1993 or so when I was going to the bathroom between bands. I had a Sharpie marker in my hand for some reason, and I was playing around with it as I walked down a long hallway to get to the bathroom. The only other person in the hallway was Tom Araya. I made a left turn towards the bathroom and went by Tom. As I walked by him, he put out his hand as though to grab the marker out of my hand to sign something. Since I didn't want him to sign anything, I just walked past him and giggled as I did so. He kinda' stood there staring as I walked past.

Okay, but back to the pictures of Tom...looking at theseleads me to believe that although Tom had long hair and was perhaps into slightly heavier music than other kids, he was well liked. He would have sort of been my friend, but would have also been friends with hot girls who were smart. He would have known that hanging out with my kind would bring his stock down, and he would have been right. The mention of him being a "bench warmer" in the first picture makes me think that he at least played some sport during his high school years. Taking all this into consideration, I think Tom and I would have let each other borrow some tapes, but he would have never hung out with me outside of school. He liked metal, but was smart enough to tone it down around hot girls and cool dudes who weren't into metal. I would have been too die-hard and stubborn (and thus loserly) for his taste. He would have signed my yearbook, but would have kept his distance. Smart move.

Veredict: Friendly during school hours.

Kirk Hammett

Just look at that picture! Filipinos have all the luck...they can make money having sex with middle aged men who like boys when they are 12, or when they are 45. Man, some ethnic groups have all the luck! Looking at this picture, and those huge glasses that make Kirk look like a Greyhound bus, it's hard to imagine that this young man would one day loose his hair and grow the world's thinnest bicycle-skid mustache. Still, Kirk would have been my boy back in the day! In the 8th grade, our lunch table would have also included the kid who looked like a fish due to severe fetal alcohol syndrome, but we still would have been happy during lunch. Forever losers when it came to the opposite sex, we would have pretended that it didn't matter to us. Inside, we cried...but on the outside...everything was gravy.

Veredict: Best buds

Gene Simmons (aka Chaim Witz)

Though it's hard to pretend that I went to high school with Gene Simmons when his picture looks like it was taken during the Civil War, I will try. Gene would have creeped me the hell out in school. Insanely intense, and douchy around girls (remember that he came from a very religious Jewish family, went to an orthodox Yeshiva for a good part of his life, and then went on to coin the term "blumpkin"), Gene would not have been my cup of tea. I picture him being the guy with greasy hair and huge dandruff flakes the size of Bran Flakes. He was the guy who was prematurely grown up, acting like an adult when he was 6. Condescending as all hell, perhaps the one thing that we would have shared would have been our disgust for all things high school. My disdain for high school students came from thinking they were all idiots due to ignorance, his would have come from thinking they were all just too young. We would have talked briefly in class, but only to ask each other for an eraser. If someone like him would have died two years after graduation, I would have said "Oh, I remember that guy. He was in my Biology class."

Veredict: Class acquaintances

Ronnie James Dio (aka Ronald James Padavona)

Like with Gene Simmons, it's hard for me to pretend I could have gone to school with someone this old, but here it goes. Ronnie played tons of sports (just look under his picture), but would have been cool. In math class, we would bond about our short stature. If you look under his name, it states that his nickname was "Pigmy", a person from any human group who grows to be less than 5 feet tall. Though I'm not that short, Dio and I would have joked around, and he would have taught me to "own" my shortness. Due to his Italian heritage, we would share stories about our crazy grandparents and their inability to function with the US. Although our musical tastes would have been slightly mismatched, we still would have hung out at parties. Ronnie would have been the guy who jokingly plopped his balls down onto the overhead projector while the teacher was talking to the assistant principal by the classroom's door.

Veredict: Friendly outside of school

Paul Stanley ( aka Stanley Harvey Eisen)

Just as it was hard for me to stretch the bounds of my imagination when it came to the pictures of Gene Simmons and Dio due to the time when they were taken, it's even harder for me to do this with Paul Stanley's picture. How am I supposed to pretend I went to school with a forty year old Jewish woman with an Emo Phillips haircut? Also, it looks like his face is melting. Okay, I'll try.

We would have been friendly in Home-Ec. class. Since Paul is an elderly jewish woman, his cooking skills would have been superior to mine, but still not great. He would have nagged me to eat, plainly stating "eat, eat! you're skin and bones!" He would tell me long-winded stories about how his aunt, auntie Pearl, was taken away by "those ghouls, the Nazis". I would ask him "Paul, why do you sound like a southern black woman sometimes?" He would dismiss my questions, and continue making flavorless meals.


Veredict: Home Ec partners

Retroview: Dio - Holy Diver

Let me state my case plainly: if you do not like this album, you are a piece of shit. If you think this album is a joke, you're a retard and you don't know shit about metal. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that if you do not like this album you have no business listening to metal. It's as simple as that.

First of all, look at the cover! How much more metal can you get than some demon drowning a chained up priest from a mountaintop under an ominous sundown!? So fucking awesome.

The album kicks off with the balls out rocker "Stand Up and Shout." Vivian Campbell (of Def Leppard fame) lays down some killer riffs while Ronnie wails nonsensical shit like "You are the driver/ You own the road/You are the fire go on explode!" "Holy Diver" is a stone cold, undeniable classic. That epic, chugging, mid-paced riff is unforgettable. Again, I have no idea what the fuck any of it means, lines like "Ride the tiger/You can see his stripes but you know he's clean," make no sense, but who cares? From there Ronnie goes on to sing about riding gypsies, not talking to strangers, and being invisible. "Straight Through the Heart" is another favorite. It's four and a half minutes of pure fist-pumping, head-banging intensity. A song about a rainbow (even if it's in the dark) with a keyboard-driven melody doesn't sound very metal, but "Rainbow in the Dark" is an umistakable classic and perhaps Dio's finest moment. The album comes to a fitting close with the creepy-crawling power ballad "Shame On the Night" and in just over forty minutes you've experienced one of the greatest metal albums ever made.

And of course let us not forget the excellent videos that accompanied the album, the most memorable of which is for the title track, "Holy Diver." It features a fur-clad Ronnie James roaming a desolate land as the most improbable and least intimidating of warriors. He turns two vagabonds into rats with his sword and then visits a blacksmith where he receives a new sword and then proceeds to prance around a castle swinging his new sword around betraying the fact that he has no idea how to actually use it. I'm not sure which makes less sense, the video or the lyrics, but I love them both dearly.

The second video is of course for "Rainbow in the Dark." In this classic video we find our favorite heavy metal elf singing on the roof of some building in a leather vest with no shirt on while some creepy schlub in a suit lusts after some chubby girl he sees on the street. Vivian Campbell then rescues the girl from the clutches of the creepy schlub by playing a guitar solo in his face and Ronnie continues strutting and singing on the roof. Keep your eyes peeled for his pointy, fur-lined white boots. Mama mia!