I need something with a different kind of bad. I'm tired of cheap monsters, no-effort day-for-night, and obvious dialogue. I need something that sucks with ambition. I need... a vanity project.
Stuntman Grant Page (playing himself) arrives in Hollywood for his new gig on the show Undercover Girl, starring Monique Vandeven (playing herself). There he's met by his cousin Curtis, who happens to belong to a rock band called Sorcery (playing themselves), and several threads ensue: Monique wants to do more of her own stunts, but her slimy agent won't let her and it's questionable whether she understands the dangers involved. A reporter named Lois becomes infatuated with Grant, but worries his line of work will get him killed. And Grant himself has some ideas for the band's stage shows... ideas that could revolutionize rock and roll!
Now, the thing you need to understand about Stunt Rock is that none of these things are actually a plot. Any of them could have been. We could have seen Monique take too many risks and get hurt, possibly leading to a lecture from Grant and some soul-searching over what she really wants her career to be about. We could have seen Grant and Lois get together, break up, and get together again, with either her coming to terms with his career or else him finding a safer one. We could have seen Sorcery hit the big time thanks to incorporating stunts into their musical magic act, only to forget where they came from and need Grant to take them down a peg or two. These are just ideas my brain tossed out during the viewing, places I might have taken this movie... but I'm not the one who wrote it.
Instead, the movie is actually a double vanity project. It's meant to be Grant Page's step up from stunt work into actual acting, as well as Sorcery's introduction to a wider audience. The entire point of putting this on movie screens is to showcase their talents, and that doesn't really require a story. What it requires is a spectacle, and that's what Stunt Rock attempts to give us. Everything in this movie looks like something you'd paint on the side of your van.
So instead of having things like a plot, the majority of this movie is made up of two things: stock footage and Sorcery concerts. The former is b-roll stuff and some behind-the-scenes from other movies Page has worked on (The Man from Hong Kong and Gone in 60 Seconds are both referenced by name), which I have to admit, does give you an appreciation for the intricacy and danger involved in stunt work. The latter is... well, Sorcery concerts. The band's schtick is they get on stage and play, while a dude dressed as the Devil from a 70's comic book and a dude dressed as Merlin from that Mexican Santa Claus movie duel it out for the audience's souls with sleight-of-hand and pyrotechnics. I have to admit, if I'd been a teenager in the 70's I probably would have thought that was fucking awesome.
The band look like they ought to be a collection of quirky, entertaining types, but since the members are just playing themselves rather than trying to be characters, they end up coming across pretty dull. Absolutely nothing is made of the content of their lyrics, which describe battles with the devil and human sacrifices. None of them are actual satanists, but nor do they seem interested in the shock value that bands like KISS go for. Rather, the songs are just a soundtrack to their magic show, which is also a sort of stage play in which a man has to pass a series of tests before being named King of the Wizards. The writers could have used this to say something about how rock music uses traditional concepts of evil to get knee-jerk reactions, but they aren't interested in thinking about stuff like that.
The only members of the band who really stand out as characters are Curtis, who doesn't have much to him but is the only one with significant dialogue, and the One in the Hood. The latter is their sound mixer, who is never seen without a balaclava. He (I think it's a man) wears several different hoods in different scenes, one of which has sequins on it. Another is a loose velvet one which is the object of the movie's only funny joke. At a party, a belligerent drunk tells the sound mixer that it's dumb to wear the hood all the time and demands that it be removed... only to find that of course, there's another hood under it. I knew it was coming, but the man's reaction still made me laugh.
Since this movie is supposed to set up Page as a bankable actor, it's a little odd that it never actually asks him to act. He talks about his work in the sort of bland voice one might use while giving a TV interview (as he does at several points), but he's never asked to express any real joy, angst, fear, or anything else that might require acting chops. The lack of any story means there's just no place to put such things. Even stranger, and actively counterproductive, is what Curtis says when he introduces Grant to his bandmates: he outright describes him as “a lousy actor”. If the movie then went on to show the opposite, that would be one thing, but it never does.
Instead, it showcases his stuntwork. Much of this is stock footage, but there are also scenes shot specifically for this movie. While filming episodes of Undercover Girl, Page does things like falling from a water tower and getting thrown through the window of a burning van. We are given enough background information on how the stunts are done to understand that they're dangerous, but we are also under no illusions that Stunt Rock will kill off its headliner. Other escapades appear to be entirely gratuitous, serving to establish his character as somebody who goes ziplining on fire for fun. This tells us a lot about what kinds of movie roles Page hoped would be coming his way – let's say he probably wasn't hoping to play Hamlet.
During several of these sequences the movie is at obvious pains to show us Page's physique. He is introduced to us dangling from a rope wearing only a pair of speedos. Later we seem him escaping the hospital by climbing out a window, and the camera looks right up his gown. We also get to see him getting wired up with blood packs under his shirt to simulate bullet wounds, and smeared in fire-repellent jelly. I can only imagine the reaction of Mike and the bots.
Movie stunts and rock concerts are theoretically exciting things to see. Sorcery's first concert performance that we watch is kind of fun, as there's a little story with the guy dressed as Merlin and his fight with the devil. Some of the stunt stuff is also interesting, as we see how things are all set up and accomplished as safely as possible. The problem is that there's entirely too much of this, and no narrative to give it any meaning. The first of Sorcery's performances is fun, but they do eight entire songs over the course of the movie and it wears out its welcome pretty quickly. Likewise, movie stunts are cool when they feel dangerous and we know something's at stake, but in this context they cannot carry the film. There's not much sense of danger when we are told Grant is in the hospital after being injured in a stunt, but we then see him climb out a window and down a wall as he hurries to be back on set for his next scene. The stunts are not part of the story, so the only thing anyone's risking is a second take.
What Stunt Rock most reminds me of is an xkcd comic which posited that the perfect action movie would be one in which we don't need to follow any story or get to know any characters, just ninety minutes of ass-kicking. This is a funny joke but probably wouldn't work, and Stunt Rock illustrates why: after a while, even what seems like the coolest shit in the world starts to get kind of boring and repetitive unless there's a story there to tell us why we should care. Ninety minutes of this with no plot whatsoever feels like an eternity. The climax of a movie should feel like everything preceding was leading up to this. Stunt Rock's final fusion of music, magic, and action is just a bunch of stuff we've already seen.
At the end, nothing is resolved because there were never really any conflicts. Monique's desire to do her own stunts led her to fire her agent, but we don't get a sense of her career trajectory changing and we never see what effect this has on filming of Undercover Girl (I like how the word 'undercover' is in the title of this show, and yet Monique's character wears a gold lamé jumpsuit that belongs in a circus or on a NASCAR track). Grant convinces Lois to go to a party with him, but I don't know if this counts as them making up because they didn't exactly ever fight to begin with. And the audience seems to enjoy Sorcery's final show, with Lois declaring that 'stunt rock' will catch on, but that's where the movie ends. None of this really seemed to mean anything while it was happening, and we aren't told whether it meant anything now that it's over.
It didn't mean much for Grant Page, who never became a movie star, though he did go on to play some smaller roles. It didn't mean much for Sorcery, who you've probably never heard of. Monique Vandeven did go on to be a successful actress and director, but Stunt Rock was no more than a blip in her career. I don't dislike this movie, which had plenty of fun or interesting moments, but it does fail at pretty much everything it set out to accomplish. Honestly, Stunt Rock barely manages to be a movie at all.
Stunt Rock will be released on Blu-ray on June 7 via Kino Lorber. The 1978 Australian musical action mockumentary includes a slipcover with alternate artwork.
Brian Trenchard-Smith (Leprechaun 3-4, BMX Bandits) directs from a script he co-wrote with Paul-Michel Mielche Jr. Grant Page, Monique van de Ven, and Margaret Trenchard-Smith star alongside the hard rock band Sorcery.
Stunt Rock has been newly restored in 4K. Read on for special features.
Special features:
Audio commentary by director Brian Trenchard-Smith and actors Grant Page and Margaret Trenchard-Smith
Not Quite Hollywood interview with director Brian Trenchard-Smith
Not Quite Hollywood interview with actor Grant Page
Conversation with director Brian Trenchard-Smith and actress Margaret Trenchard-Smith
2009 interview with director Brian Trenchard-Smith, Sorcery guitarist Smokey Huff, and producer Marty Fink
Theatrical trailer
Select songs from the soundtrack (first time in stereo)
While working on a TV show in Los Angeles, legendary Australian stuntman Grant Page helps fantasy-themed rock band Sorcery develop wild special effects and dangerous stunts for their concert tour.
I truly TRUELY believe that stunt Rock is one of the greatest creative artists of my generation but nobody seems to remember him, or have heard of him. Also some of the most POWERFULLY emotional electronic music I've ever heard.
It blew my fucking mind how precisely poetic the words were when you read the samples like lyrics. Write em down as they play.
