Studio 666

The guys who make up the music group, the Foo Fighters, are not real actors.  Not that it matters here, as Studio 666 is not a real movie.  It's a lark where a bunch of friends got together to make a blood-soaked tongue-in-cheek horror comedy film, probably had a blast making it and cracking each other up, and now hope that the audience finds the stuff as funny as they obviously did when they were making it.

This is the kind of movie that doesn't belong on the big screen, or even on streaming.  It's best watched in a basement, surrounded by the guys who made it, with lots of food and drink to go around.  Unfortunately, few if any of us will get the chance to watch it in such ideal conditions, so the average filmgoer has to judge it for what it is - A movie that's not scary enough to be a horror film, and not funny enough to be a comedy.  Oh, it gets some things right.  They not only got John Carpenter to compose the film's theme song, but he makes a cameo as well.  And even if the band members who make up the main cast can't act very well, they obviously have a comfortable chemistry with each other up on the screen, and are having fun.  And I admit to smiling a few times, and laughing out loud during a sequence that concerns a surprise cameo from Lionel Richie.  However, these are the few moments of pleasure it provides in its overlong 106 minutes.

Let it be said that the Foo Fighters frontman, Dave Grohl (who is credited with the story), throws himself into playing a caricature of himself as a struggling artist, stumped with writer's block and with a deadline for a 10th studio album looming.  Sensing his desperation, the head of the record label (Jeff Garlin) sends Dave and his bandmates (Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, and Rami Jaffee) to a broken down old house that has a dark and ominous history concerning the mysterious death of a rising band that was recording an album there back in 1993.  The guys settle in to work, and before long, Dave is unearthing a secret basement room in the house with a gutted raccoon nailed to the wall, and an ancient demonic text buried under the floorboards.  Dave becomes possessed by whatever evil entity haunts the home, and the other guys look on curiously as he develops a taste for raw meat.

He also becomes obsessed with completing an unfinished rock song that he finds in the hidden room, and his madness consumes him so completely that the song turns into a 40-minute rock epic.  There's a snoopy woman who lives next door who might know more about the house than she claims (Whitney Cummings), and as the bandmates start slowly unearthing the truth behind the mystery, the movie resembles a gory episode of Scooby-Doo, with various people falling victim to Dave's newly-formed cannibal appetite.  I definitely get what director B.J. McDonnell and writers Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes are going for, but the movie just never gains the momentum that it should.  It works in bits and pieces, but there were long stretches where my eyes started to glaze over, and I was getting restless.

Studio 666 pays homage to a lot of horror conventions, such as shadow people lurking in the woods and graphic death scenes, but it stops there.  It's simply paying lip service, while never actually stepping up its game and taking the next step that would truly make it memorable.  It's not enough just to show two people get cut in half with a chainsaw while they are having sex.  Yeah, it's an impressive effect, but that's all it is here, because there's no build up or pay off.  Think back on Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, which I think this one is emulating.  There was inventive camerawork, and the way those movies mixed the bloodshed and carnage with slapstick humor was nothing short of inspired.  Here, I got the sense that the band brainstormed some gruesome death scenes, and insisted the writers toss them in.  Nothing builds, so we get a mediocre tribute to horror with some big kills, but little to hold our interest the rest of the time.

This is a movie that I can admire in a way, and I'm sure it was great fun to make.  But if the audience doesn't get to share in that fun, the movie simply becomes a private joke between the cast and the crew projected onto the screen.  I was happy for the people up on the screen, but I also found myself asking more than once what the point of it was.

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