Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park
Aka: Attack of the Phantoms
Director: Gordon Hessler
1978
Music/Fantasy/Horror
Kiss is the largest music attraction in the
world and they’ve come to play in this theme park. Meanwhile Abner Devereaux,
the parks developer, gets even stranger ideas than usual and is ultimately
fired by his old friend who happens to also be the owner. He plans his gruesome
revenge! His plan to replace the famous rock group with his own creatures and
use them to start a riot begins…
According
to legend – haven’t you always wanted to start a review with those words? –
Kiss themselves hates the movie. I don’t know if this is the truth or not; or
if Ace and Peter should be involved in the hatred. It seems to me that Gene and Paul are the ones who always made all the decisions anyway; even
when the classic lineup was a reality. But I understand them; this is a real
piece of crap really! But on the other hand – I like it as hell! It poorly
acted, the effects are really bad and the storyline is almost nonexistent. But
still it’s very entertaining and the bands mythology – the demon, the star
child, space Ace and the cat man. Each of them has their unique power which is
brought to them via a certain talisman, is very amusing.
The band
themselves are really poor actors! Gene
is somewhat better and has in fact made a few parts since then. Runaway and Wanted Dead or Alive comes to mind. He is far better as a terrorist
in those movies than as himself here though. How odd does that sound? Anthony Zerbe, who plays the main villain
Abner Devereaux is pretty decent though. I mean that his character might be
poorly written but I think he does what can be done with the part.
But it
doesn’t really matter that the production is dull. There are entertainment
values in this turkey beyond belief. Plus that all the music is top notch!
There are even a scene where some androids (yes, it’s a long story) sings some
barber shop. Well, maybe it isn’t such a long story after all. When this Abdner
dude gets fired he uses his creations to attack the band and replace them with
his own duplicates. He then plans to wreck the park by rewriting the lyrics to
titles like Hotter than Hell, making it into Rip and Destroy and hope
that Kiss’ fans will take it literally.
Come to think of it, there is also a great acoustic guitar version of Beth!
If you
can get hold of this I suggest you get it! It’s really bad but as I said it’s
very entertaining! I once used a rating system where a U represented the grade. The right part was all the good aspects,
the real quality stuff, and the left part was all entertaining. It was used as guidance
to weather it was a really good film or just a bad but entertaining one. I’m
not sure why this grading system was lost but I guess there was a problem
visualizing it. Anyway, this would render a high rating on the left side of the
U!
8/10
