Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars the Voices of Tommy Blacha, Brendon Small, Mark Hamill, Victor Brandt,
Malcolm McDowell, Laraine Newman, George Fisher | Written by Brendon Small & Tommy Blacha
Certification 15 | RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 242 minutes | Created by Brendon Small & Tommy Blacha
Adult Swim has always been hit and miss with its animated programming. Shows like Family Guy, Robot Chicken and American Dad!, for me, never get old and have infinite “re-watch” value. But – and there's always a but – on the rather dull and uninteresting flipside of the Cartoon Network “extension”, you've got forgettable garbage the likes of which include the infantile Titan Maximum and the flat-out boring, humourless Metalocalypse.
Metalocalypse is all about the most famous people on the planet: a five-piece death metal band by the name of Dethklok (sic), which is comprised of three American and two Finnish members. Yes, whether it takes you by surprise or not, Finland is one of the global hotspots for metal music. The band even become the seventh largest economy in the world by the end of the season, and positively thanks to their bizarrely dedicated fanbase who will do pretty much anything for their beloved band, such as seriously hurt themselves – and that would be putting it lightly. The members of the band, who reside in a castle of all places, are incompetent in just about every aspect of life apart from being the collective gods of metal, and they rely solely on their consistently dumbfounded manager to run everything. Although, it isn't just their own idiocy and actions that are to blame for their usually grisly misfortunes, as there's always someone trying to send them six feet under, from bloodthirsty cults to conniving space aliens.
The show is extremely graphic and somehow the gore, even in its animated state, is to some degree realistic. The only problem is that there is just so much blood and guts that any humour that was injected into such brutality and gratuity is briskly sucked out. The same goes for the countless profanities, which are nearly all obscured by a guitar riff. That is indeed a creative way of censoring your show without the use of any annoying bleeps, and it's also pretty funny the first time you hear it, but when you have so many such words “riffed out”, it gets old fast. So fast in fact, that the first of many obligatory “barrage of censored profanities” gags that all adult cartoons seem to think they are the creators of, falls flat on its ugly, long-haired face.
Couple the aforementioned, irredeemable shortcomings with the fact that you can barely understand any of the dialogue and jokes thanks to the strange accents of the motley crew of characters, and you've got a show with an excruciatingly bad death metal soundtrack (of course) that gets a rocking great thumbs down from me.
EXTRAS None.