1999: Detroit Rock City (18th)

What else happened this year? From memory, everyone was going mad about the Matrix, Will Smith was still around, and there was mild worry about the millennium. Simpler times.

What is the plot - in one sentence? in 1970s Detroit, 4 boneheads try to get to a KISS concert.

I don't have time, just spoil it for me? After many trials and tribulations, they get to the concert, but not before... having sex with a crush in a church and then shouting at his religious mother; sleeping with a weird-looking woman met at a male strip club; stopping a rape and recovering a stolen car with the help of some dogs; and stopping a robbery and being made out with by the cashier for no reason... respectively.

What is the meaning of the Title? It's a KISS song. It's also where the action takes place. For the record Detroit's Mo-Town output is more culturally significant than its rock.

Here are the 4 main boneheads. Guess how many of them carved out careers for themselves after this?

Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? Uh... it's set in the 70s but it's very of its time in the late 90s. A girl that they meet is tied up and threatened with rape, but luckily that never happens. There's also a scene where one of the guys has sex with a woman with big features, who I was certain was going to end up being a man, because that's 90s comedy...but she wasn't, she was just attracted to a dead-eyed kid so much that she had sex with him in a very public car park and then gave him money. What was that about?*

Any thoughts? I am happy to admit that I'm not the target market for this now (though I'm still younger than KISS were at the time it was filmed - they make an appearance at the end), and I think I wouldn't have really enjoyed this even then. The four characters were completely generic when they weren't annoying. The earnest one with a religious mother was annoying, the lead one was creepy, the one with the fringe and underbite annoying, and the long-haired one was worst of all.

I also spent a long time wondering what I'd seen the 'lead' one in? He was the annoying kid in Terminator 2, and it looked like the intervening... 8... years had been hard on the guy. Also, he had stage-fright in the beginning, which is why they were playing a concert in their basement instead of to an audience - I was sure that was going to be rectified later on. It wasn't.

Would you recommend this? No. It wasn't very funny or interesting. I despised most of the characters - the stoner guy in the hat being the most annoying, and despite having a brief appearance by the band at the end, it's telling that most of the main musical beats were by other bands - you know why? KISS is all style and no substance and its music isn't good enough to hold up a movie. The soundtrack was good, but the soundtrack had very little KISS in it.

Final thoughts? I suppose that this was meant to be a showcase of the era, but Rock 'N' Roll High School did this a million times better with the music of the Ramones, and that at least had the balls to stand by its music and have a bit of charm about it. Watch that instead. The only interesting thing might be the very brief Gene Simmons tongue POV, which must have cost a lot more than the .3 seconds it was allowed on screen. 

 More of this year by year movie reviews can be found here.

*Looking it up, that woman, who has the same look that every woman Frasier would be infatuated with, is Gene Simmons' girlfriend at the time. In the logic of the movie she hung out at a Chippendales style dance club, had sex with a dance competitor outside, then gave him some money for luck. Did Gene Simmons want that, surely he must have? Weird.