Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith
Written by Paul-Michel Mielche Jr. and Brian Trenchard-Smith
Starring Grant Page, Monique van de Ven, Margaret Gerard, and Sorcery
Runtime: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Rated PG

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

I am convinced that Stunt Rock exists inside the collective unconscious. I don’t know where I heard about it and had no idea what it was even about before popping Kino Lorber’s new reissue into my Blu-Ray player, it became abundantly clear why Stunt Rock is a cult classic. Part docudrama, part concert film, part stuntman compilation reel, Stunt Rock is a singular experience. Is it a cohesive film? Absolutely not. Is the plot held together by silly string and scotch tape? You bet your ass it is. Is the acting totally brutal featuring some of the worst line-reading I have ever seen in a feature film? Oh yeah. Here’s the thing though: none of that matters. This is Stunt Rock, and you’re either a stunt rocker or you’re not.

The closest thing to a plot Stunt Rock gets is that it’s ostensibly about real-life Australian stuntman Grant Page coming to Los Angeles to help an up-and-coming metal band called Sorcery with stunts for their stage show. The result is a perfect time capsule for 1978, as though compiled by the things an 11-year-old would find cool: sick stunts, heavy metal, and magic tricks. As a movie, it simultaneously makes your bones hurt and makes you wish the Academy would recognize the talents of stunt performers. In addition to Page’s death-defying stunts being, for lack of a better descriptor, totally gnar dawg, his natural charisma serves as the film’s weird nucleus. When the movie isn’t following Page schmoozing with an actress and a journalist writing a story about him, it’s making proto-music videos for Sorcery. Sorcery’s live show involves elaborate set pieces including a wizard and a devil doing magic tricks to represent a battle between good and evil. It is breathtakingly lame, and Stunt Rock’s biggest weakness is that every time it cuts to one of these performances the whole movie grinds to a standstill. Only late in the game does it tie into the threadbare plot with Grant Page for some welcome cohesion, but it’s too little too late.

Still, the result is a strangely captivating trainwreck. It’s a curiosity of a film that doesn’t really require a Blu-Ray reissue, but there is an audience out there who will eat it up. That’s not a knock if this is your jam, God bless you, but this is going to be a hard sell to anyone who can’t handle shlock. I suppose it’s important to zoom out and remember this came from a world where we weren’t all desensitized by YouTube and you really didn’t have an outlet for rock-and-roll, high risk stunts, cars flying off cliffs, dudes on fire, etc. So while this fails on pretty much every level when approaching it as you would any other film, it excels as a cultural artifact from a bygone era.