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…