The Bonkers 1978 Cult Classic Stunt Rock Has It All: Mind-blowing Stunts, Theatrical Rock and Roll, Magic, The Devil, Wizardry and Phil Hartman's Film Debut
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Researching The Fractured Mirror, my massive upcoming book about the history of American movies about filmmaking, gave me a new appreciation for stuntmen.
One of my niftiest discoveries was the Stunt Man movie and its high-flying variation, the Stunt Pilot movie. Beyond classics like Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man and Hal Needham’s Hooper lies an entire subgenre of macho action movies about the fascinating subculture of men and occasionally women, who make their living risking their lives on a daily basis.
These films exist for the sake of stunts that are often breathtaking and mind-blowing. While obsessively looking for weird, obscure movies about filmmaking for my book I discovered 1978’s Stunt Rock.
Stunt Rock is, regrettably, an Australian movie from Aussie tough guy auteur Brian Trenchard-Smith and consequently not appropriate for a book about American movies.
It was, however, a movie that I absolutely had to see. So I was grateful when a kind reader chose it as a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choice. That gave me what little excuse I needed to finally experience the glorious madness of Stunt Rock.
What makes Stunt Rock such a tantalizing proposition? For starters, it’s called Stunt Rock because of its bifurcated theme: stunts and rock and roll.
But that’s not all! Stunt Rock combines all of the following:
*Some of the most amazing stunts you’ll ever see in your life courtesy of real-life stuntman Grant Page
*The music of Sorcery, a hilariously theatrical hard rock band whose elaborate shtick anticipates both the elaborate pageantry and weird morality of Insane Clown Posse
*Wizardry in the form of Merlin, King of the Wizards
*The Prince of Darkness
*Magic
*Phil Hartman’s exceedingly brief film debut
How could anyone resist such a proposition? I am pleased to report that Stunt Rock is everything that I had hoped it would be and so much more.
Trenchard-Smith has called Stunt Rock his worst film. That’s damning, considering that the prolific genre writer-director’s filmography includes multiple Leprechaun sequels, a direct-to-video sequel to the Christsploitation End Times Thriller The Omega Code and a sequel to Porky’s entitled Porky’s Pimpin’ Pee Wee that is what is known as “ashcan copy” that is made cheaply and quickly solely for the sake of holding onto the rights of intellectual property.
Trenchard-Smith might consider Stunt Rock his worst film, but I consider it possibly the greatest film ever made.
Page stars as a fictionalized version of himself. He’s a hotshot, in-demand stuntman as well as an Evel Knievel-style daredevil who is forever chasing death via air, land, and fire.
Page is downright superhuman in his fearlessness and ability to do the impossible on a daily basis. He’s the best of the best, so he leaves Australia to work in Hollywood on a television show starring Monique van de Ven, a Dutch actress best known for her feature film debut as the film debut in Paul Verhoeven’s notorious Turkish Delight as herself.
The stuntman is eager to visit his cousin Curtis Hyde, who makes a curious living portraying a flamboyant Prince of Darkness as part of the stage show of Sorcery, whose shtick was so ridiculous and over the top it makes KISS look like dour minimalists by comparison.
A Sorcery concert offered so much more than just music. It wasn’t a concert: it was an experience. The concert featured hard-driving rock and roll about the devil from a group featuring a drummer in a top hat, a guitarist with a two-tone perm, and a synthesizer player who wears a series of glittery masks to hide his face, possibly because he looks like television personality Dr. Phil McGraw.
More importantly Sorcery shows of the era featured a magician playing the Prince of Darkness (that would be Page’s fake cousin Hyde) squaring off against Merlin, King of the Wizards in an epic battle for control of humanity.
That either sounds like the best idea in music history or the worst. There’s no in-between. I’ll be the first to concede that Sorcery is an acquired taste even without the ridiculous Prince of Darkness versus Merlin, The King of Wizards conceit. But if you were on either a large amount of cocaine or LSD in 1978 this camp spectacle would rock your world. I was not sober while watching Stunt Rock. It’s not the kind of movie that should be experienced in a lucid state. It’s better approached as a psychedelic fever dream. =
It’s Merlin, King of the Wizards.
Early in the film a friend only half-jokingly refers to Page as a terrible actor. That might seem perverse or counter-intuitive for a film designed to establish Page as a leading man/real life action hero.
There’s a method to the film’s madness. The tossed off aside lowered my expectations to the point that I found myself thinking, “He’s not that bad” rather than, “Stick to stunts, amateur.”
If nothing else, hotshot Australian stunt legend Grant Page did not have to research the role of hotshot Australian stunt legend Grant Page. Page might not be much of a thespian but he has real presence. It’s a refreshing change of pace to see an action movie starring a guy who can actually perform daring, dangerous, and deadly deeds rather than merely pretend to be brave.
Stunt Rock’s faint whisper of a plot finds hard-charging journalist Lois Smith (Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director’s wife) pursuing a story about the exciting world of stuntmen. Why are they so brave? What makes them do what they do? How flimsy a premise can the filmmakers get away with?
The answer to that last question, at least, is “extremely.” Stunt Rock is at least half documentary, in that much of it is either performance footage of Sorcery or Page in action, performing an endless series of incredible stunts.
In its bid to fill 90 minutes with non-stop action Stunt Rock borrows the most exciting stunts of other, previous films as well, including the movies that Page had already made with Trenchard-Smith: The Man From Hong Kong and Death Cheaters. At its most shameless, it even includes black-and-white public domain footage of the early evolution of stunt-work.
These weird worlds come together at the very end, when Page performs a stunt at a Sorcery concert, to the delight of all.
I love rock and roll movies. I love movies about stuntmen. Stunt Rock is a glorious hybrid, an alternately geeky and macho b-movie marvel that’s equally pitched to Dungeons and Dragons nerds, adventurous members of the Kiss Army, and action-movie bros.
Also, bizarrely but wonderfully, Stunt Rock is Phil Hartman's film debut. It's a blink-and-you-miss-it bit part but how crazy is it that one of the most talented and beloved comic performers of all time would make his maiden bow as a film actor in an Australian cult oddity?
I’ve never seen anything quite like Stunt Rock. It is that rarest and most wonderful of entities: a true original.
That’s the crazy thing about Stunt Rock; it’s barely a movie, yet it is perfect in its own weird way.
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here