Deathgasm (2015)

Deathgasm arrives from New Zealand in 2015 with a title that promises exactly what it delivers: a teenage heavy metal band, an ancient piece of sheet music, and a small town's worth of demonic possession rendered in practical gore. Brodie, freshly consigned to his Christian uncle's custody, forms a band with Zakk, plays the Black Hymn, and watches his neighbors turn. The film's pleasures are the ones its critics have catalogued for a decade: chainsaws, sex toys, arterial spray, a fortune teller in a back room. It is a splatter comedy that knows its audience and asks nothing of it beyond a tolerance for viscera.

Seen through the lens of contemporary cultural taxonomy, the film is a desert. The cast is white New Zealand performers, and no gesture is made toward representation as a concept. No LGBTQ+ characters appear. Medina exists to be romanced, betrayed over, and finally won, which is the extent of the film's interest in its women. Race, climate, economics, body image, neurodivergence: none of these enter the frame. The antagonists are cultists and demons, not landlords or oil executives. The film's relationship to the human body is strictly dismemberment. Even the Christian uncle, an obvious candidate for a sermon about religious repression, is dispatched as a gag instead of a thesis.

The film is juvenile by design and unbothered by the fact. Howden drew on his own teenage alienation, and the result carries no moral instruction, no invitation to improve, no lesson tucked beneath the blood. It wants to be loud, and it is. There is nothing here to classify beyond the obvious, and the film would take that as a compliment.