KISS meets the Phantom of the Park

[clockworkcanary]

I've been thinking about this b-flick for some time and noticed that it doesn't appear on many movie review sites that I frequent.  I always love finding really bad movies that are seldom reviewed and I also love bad movies where musicians try to act (when it's apparent they cannot in the slightest).  Unfortunately, I've had a difficult time locating this one but luckily for me, my brother-in-law who's a major KISS fan just happens to have it on VHS!  I have only seen smidgets of this disaster of a film and have heard many cannot sit through it.  Has anyone watched this in its entirety survived to tell about it?

[Scott]

Saw this when it first aired on TV back in the 70's and was I dissappointed being a big KISS fan in those days. If I remember right we had a hard time sitting through it then. It's 28 years later and I might have to watch this one again using B-Movie Vision obtained here at badmovies.org.

[clockworkcanary]

If I remember right, there's animatronic (sp?) versions of each of the KISS members, an african american playing Ace at one point, and each of them have super powers (except Peter who had the power of...um...cat puns) hehe.  Sounds like a great b-flick to review at some point but damn, my queue is so full atm.

[ulthar]

Cool flick (in a it's so bad it's fun sorta way).  Discussed earlier here.

[Menard]

I had seen it when it was first broadcast on TV. Strangely, I don't recall it having been promoted till the night it was shown. I actually enjoyed the movie. Yes, it's hokey, cheesy, and everything else you would like to call it, but it was entertaining. On a subsequent viewing (it was playing on late night TV once), I found it to be boring as hell; so it does not stand up well for repeat viewings.

Contrary to your opinion about musicians acting, many musicians have successfully transitioned into acting (of course, it wasn't in this movie). Even though Gene Simmons was the one who went on to an acting career, Peter Criss did the best out of the group; of course, he had the most material with which to work as Gene just primarily growled a lot and posed for fake fire breathing shots.

[Him]

During the premiere, Paul Stanley said he was leaning so far down in his seat he could have crawled out the theater.

[Shadow]

I can remember watching this as a kid when it first aired and the next school day a friend swore up and down that the band members really did have those powers in real life. He was just adamant about it and wouldn't listen to reason. Of course, we were all of nine years of age. 

[Scott]

Shadowfyre your friend must have been a member of the KISS ARMY. One of their many legions of fans.

[Shadow]

Now that you mention it...I think he was a member.

[Scott]

I know that I always wanted to join, but I think it cost $10 bucks or something. Ten dollars I didn't have. With membership you would get small tokens of KISS merchandize including a patch or sticker if I remember right.

[Shadow]

A local radio personality once called the Kiss Army the "Trekkies of the music industry."

[Yaddo 42]

Saw it when it first aired on network TV, seem to remember seeing lots of ads for it, but not sure if it was saturation just before it aired or not. A lot of other kids I knew saw it, it came up in our playground games and talks quite often. Usually followed by someone bringing out the whole "Knights/Kids In Satan's Service" mess. Didn't buy it even then, but in my mind at the time why couldn't you be a rock star/superhero/supernatural being all in one? Larger than life, costume and make-up wearing, and famous (to kids anyway) how could they not go together.

I liked the film at the time, seeing it when I was a little older, I first began to appreciate it's true "bad charms". It's probably also the reason I never became a fan of their music, I tried but it was hard to take their music seriously by then. I associated it with "kids stuff" from when I was little and wanted nothing to do with. Plus "Beth" got played way more than anything else of their's around here even years later.

Pointless footnote: I had two uncles who shared a mobile home near us when I was little, there was a poster for the Destroyer album on their living room wall. To this day both deny it was their's and say the other must have owned it.

[Ash]

I haven't seen the film, but I have seen KISS in concert and I can tell you that it was without a doubt, the best concert I've ever seen!

I saw them when all four original members reunited in 1998 for the Psycho Circus tour.
When you got in the door, you were handed cool KISS 3-D glasses.  Not the old blue & red kind that hurt your eyes, these were much better.
There was an enormous screen behind the stage and it would tell you when to put your glasses on and then you were bombarded with some of the coolest images.

I remember standing on my tip-toes and looking out over the audience.
All you could see was a sea of people all wearing 3-D glasses and rocking out to KISS.
I will never forget that show.

I still have the 3-D glasses!

[clockworkcanary]

Oops didn't mean to bring up an old topic - didn't know it already existed.  Also, I suppose I shouldn't have painted all musicians-to-actors with the same brush; it's just the bad examples always way heavier than the good ones.

I've been an off and on again fan of KISS, favoring their earliest work the most, Dressed to Kill and Hotter than Hell come to mind.  I couldn't stand their Crazy Nights albums and the ones from that era, but then they unjumped the shark with the album that had Unholy on it (can't remember which it is).   

Yeah I'm going to see about borrowing the VHS copy my bro-in-law has - I must try to watch this all the way through. 

Funny thought just occurred to me - when I was little (about 5 or 6) I had a Peter Chris shirt, which was my favorite shirt at the time and my mother made me get rid of it due to the Satanic Panic of the 70s (which peaked in the 80s) and I was so mad about it.  I remember everyone telling my parents how KISS stood for some crazy evil acronym like Knights in Satan's Service or something like that.  Pretty funny now that I think about it.

[ulthar]

I remember everyone telling my parents how KISS stood for some crazy evil acronym like Knights in Satan's Service or something like that.  Pretty funny now that I think about it.

I remember all that, too.  My best friend was a bigtime KISS fan (even bigger than I was) - his room was wall-to-wall and ceiling KISS posters.  He was at the concert for KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM and he was at the ALIVE II concert, as well as some others.  I remember talking to him about this Kings in Satan's Service business, and his reply was..

"No, it's Satin Service, you know, like lovers."

You know what, if you listen to their lyrics and song titles, that's as good a rationalization as any.  The only 'demon' thing about them was Gene and his makeup; it's not like they sang songs about the devil and stuff.  Oh well.

Black Sabbath DID sing about the devil and stuff, and a lot of folks took that to mean there were 'problems' there.  But again, if you read the lyrics, it is plain to see that Butler's lyrics were not praising evil but scared to death of it; he was not praising drug abuse, but writing about be destroyed by it.  You have a similar situation with Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" which caught a lot of fire in the US as being "pro-evil" when this song was the lyrical rediction of a frightening nightmare Steve Harris had.  My point is that art is SUPPOSED to expose our fears and weaknesses as well as challenge us and that's what these guys did.  A lot of Classic and Romantic period visual art depicted fear-of-death and the thoughts of religous conflict between good and evil, and I wonder if that art was similarly attacked at those times.

Those were crazy times with Rock music.  I remember one class in high schoool in which we studied "backmasking' and the supposed satanism in music for almost half the school year.  (this was a government class, and the 'topic' was censorship).  I was always amused that no one in the class could hear the backward messages until someone told them what to listen for.  Then they could all hear it.

I also always wondered what people feared from rock music.