In Deathgasm's opening scene, it's obvious that our protagonist, a high-school metalhead named Brodie, is an homage to some of film's most memorable teenage antiheroes. The film is set in the suburbs of New Zealand, and the story is familiar—super-smart, artistic kid with delinquent parents gets transferred to a new school, falls in love with the pretty girl, gets beat up by jocks, then resorts to hanging out with weirdos and nerds.

But Deathgasm ups the ante by making Brodie a heavy-metal superfan who—in addition to scaring his conservative, Bible-thumping aunt and uncle with his loud "devil music," scary T-shirts, and corpse makeup—accidentally inherits an ancient code on an old tattered piece of paper, in the form of sheet music. This actual, real-deal "devil's music," called the "Black Hymn," opens a portal to hell and invites the arrival of a freaky demon named the Blind One (who, of course, wants to destroy earth and all the humans).

When Brodie's new band DEATHGASM ("all caps, 'cause lowercase is for pussies!") plays the "Black Hymn" in his uncle's garage—that's when the movie's serious fun begins. The film goes 100 percent balls-out, no apologies, with jokes and more jokes—and with snappy one-liners paired with metric tons of horror gore and bloodletting. The whole affair becomes another homage, this time to the greatest horror-comedy of all-time, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy. But even with its influences clearly out there, Deathgasm has enough humor and originality to propel it into becoming its own goofy monster. It's silly, immature, and the lowest-of-brow, but because it never pretends to be anything other than an unrealistic, tongue-in-cheek story of high-school friendship (and of Satan and heavy-metal music), it succeeds completely.

At the moment that Brodie has to kill his aunt and uncle (who've turned from good Christian folks into ravenous killer demons) with their own double-dong dildo and anal-bead set Brodie finds hidden in a box labeled "church stuff"—it becomes clear that Deathgasm is a contender for the title of "cult" alongside not only Evil Dead but the forever reigning king of music parodies, the one and only Spinal Tap. A+, New Zealand!