Black Roses (1988)

I was browsing the Horror section of my local video store (The Video Fan) the other day and I spotted a VHS that stuck out in the wall of other colorful rectangles. For non-Richmonders, I didn't take a time machine to 1995. I'm one of the lucky people who lives close to a classic video store. And one of my favorite things to do there is walk though the store and make the decision of what I'm going to rent based solely on the cover art. Horror, Sci-Fi, and Kung-Fu movies always win based on this criteria. Anyway I saw this really gnarly looking VHS with a 3-D, pop-out cover. It was Black Roses and it won the prize.  Let's talk about it.  

First off, this movie is very bad. Sometimes it's bad in a good way. But mostly it's just a bad movie. Looking back there was actually a lot of cool cheesy deaths and bad-ass 80s metal. Unfortunately all of this was ruined by all of the slow and repetitive shit that was in between it.

The movie begins immediately with a Black Roses concert. At this point in the movie the band looks like it's somewhere between Gwar and The Chuck E Cheese Band. They're playing the best song in the movie, "Me Against The World." Then everyone in the audience basically turns into zombies. It is a very attention grabbing cold open.  

Black Roses is starting their tour in the small town of Mill Basin (even though we just saw them play a show in another town.) The adults of Mill Basin are uneasy about Black Roses preforming in their small little town and corrupting their youth. Their concerns are more than validated throughout this movie as the kids turn into demons/monsters and kill the adults. All of these deaths are pretty great. One in particular involved a creature that looked like an alligator/scorpion/crab coming out of a speaker and slowly attacking this guy and then sucking him into the speaker. Also this creature's tail was obviously a vacuum cleaner tube.

Despite some of the awesomeness and Troll 2 quality special effects, this movie just wasn't very entertaining overall. It had a very lazy screenplay that just seemed to be repeating the same pattern over and over with a few cool cheesy over the top scenes sprinkled on top.  

I like watching dumb B-movies and this movie certainly wasn't a waste of time. But at the same time I could probably list about 50 dumb B-movies I would rather watch than this one.