Bottom Feeders: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park

You may have noticed that a lot of the movies I review aren’t technically that bad.  That’s because I go about reviewing terrible movies the same way I would go about reviewing spicy foods.  In either case you don’t want to let the adjective overpower the noun.  For instance, if I were a spicy foods connoisseur I wouldn’t just pour ‘Rapey Dave’s Buttfuck Atomic Holocaust’ down my throat because I still have to review it and there’s not much to say past ‘Yes, this one is also very spicy.’  So when people ask me why I haven’t reviewed ‘Meet the Spartans’ or ‘Transmorphers’ the answer is that those are the novelty hot sauces of movies.  I generally avoid them because when I review things I don’t want to end up sounding like Comic Book Guy.

For me to really want to review it a movie needs something other than ‘idiots made this’ that I can latch onto.  It clears out a lot of B horror movie and Grindhouse flicks I’d otherwise have to sift through.  Still, every once in awhile something is going to fall through the cracks.  I’ll find a movie that’s Troll 2 bad and Brett Ratner inexcusable, which is exactly what happened this week.  If Bottom Feeders movies were basketball legends Did You Hear About the Morgans would be Michael Jordan and Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park would be the meteor collision that kills everyone and brings back dinosaurs.

It’s a movie where every scene is an extreme long shot.  The applicable characters may or may not be in focus or even visible.  Combine this with the fact that every character’s dialogue is dubbed and the movie turns into a fun game where you try not to go insane wondering who let this happen.  After the intro song, Kiss doesn’t even appear on-screen until half an hour in and when they finally do, Ace Frehley has a stunt double who is clearly black.  At one point Gene Simmons lights another stuntman on fire and he stays lit just a little too long, flailing around and yelling “Shit!”  On top of all that, there’s not even a Phantom of the Park.  Not in the sense that they see a ghost and it turns out to be an illusion – it’s just a guy running around the whole time.  At one point in the story he even gets fired for being a total dick and basically says “I’m going to go ruin your shit now!” and runs back into his office.  I feel like after you fire someone and they threaten you they should be forced to leave, but I’m not nearly insane enough to try and tell this movie what makes sense.  Phantom of the Park is so shitty even Kiss didn’t want it to be seen.  For years, anyone that worked for them was forbidden from mentioning it.  It’s still a touchy subject for Gene Simmons, and he has a shitty reality show and a sex tape he totally didn’t leak himself.

Gene Simmons is a prick, by the way.  He was always the least musically talented in the band and the first to sell out.  I know you need to market yourselves and every artist has to make choices they’d rather not at some point, but in 1978 Kiss made about 10 million dollars.  That’s probably half the money there even was back then.  Still, their manager decided Rock had taken them about as far as it was going to and it was time to turn them into movie stars.  Then it was just a matter of getting one of the consistently worst directors of all time, two screenwriters with one previous credit and wrapping a movie around four drug-addled rock stars with absolutely no previous acting experience.  They expected it to be successful and for this to be the first step towards Kiss moving away from music.  When it failed, Kiss decided they wouldn’t make music anyways and released Dynasty the next year.

And you know what?  Despite all that, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park is a fucking blast.  If you hadn’t guessed from the “_____ Meets the Phantom of the _____” title it’s basically a Hannah Barbera film, so you can bet your ass there’s silly Scooby Doo music playing whenever they fight.  The opening scene is Kiss playing “Rock and Roll All Night” while shittily superimposed over theme park rides. A giant Peter Criss drums on a revolving carousel and yes, that’s the coolest thing he does all movie.  All their enemies are stuntmen pretending to be robots and every time they get hit, fake added-in sparks fly off them.  You know, so the kids know they’re not real.  And when you finally do see Kiss after the intro, Paul Stanley shoots a laser out of his eye and dances down it onto earth.  Oh yeah, Kiss have super powers:

• Gene Simmons has super strength, breathes fire, roars like a lion and has a ton of reverb added when he speaks.
• Ace Frehley shoots lasers and teleports when he jerks his thumb.  He also shouts “ack!” a lot.
• Paul Simon shoots lasers that let him control minds, read far-off conversations or…you know, kill stuff.
• Peter Criss plays drums.  And he can leap or some shit.

In between all the fighting and general mystery-based shenanigans, Kiss occasionally climb on stage and perform a song or two – and holy shit could they write some good straight-forward rock back in their day.  I loved Kiss when I was a kid.  I just thought they were awesome guys in costumes writing rock songs and not giving a fuck.  That image has been totally spoiled for me, but this movie is still bagood as shit.  In the final scene they get onstage one more time and fight evil clones of themselves (black Ace Frehley really shines, here.) and then play Rock and Roll All Night again while the credits roll.  It’s the perfect kind of terrible. -DT

 

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