All you need to know about this 1978 Australia/US/Netherlands co-production Stunt Rock is in its name. You like stunts? You like rock? C’mere, kid, meet director Brian Trenchard-Smith behind the school and you can have everything those things meant in 1978, all carried out with an unpretentious innocence, dramatic incoherence and no redeeming social value at all. It’s ridiculous, dangerous and loads of fun.
Australian stuntman Grant Page (who faced death in films like Mad Dog Morgan, Mad Max and other movies that didn’t have Mad in the title but should have) plays himself in a bare-bones plot (as it were) that has the fire-for-hire taking a stunt gig in Los Angeles, where his cousin Curtis Hyde (playing himself) is the lead singer for the hammy hard rock band Sorcery.
For most of the 86 minutes that follow the high-wire opening, Stunt Rock proceeds like a combination clip show and concert movie. You get shots of Page at work, sometimes for a TV show starring Dutch actress Monique van de Ven (playing herself); and sometimes on previous films like Mad Dog Morgan, where he stands in for a literally inflamed Dennis Hopper. Then you get Sorcery performing entire songs in concert, accompanied by a stage show featuring a parade of facial-hair and screeching rock vocals that are pretty entertaining on their own. But there’s more: Sorcery’s stage-drama includes the King of the Wizards in eternal battle with The Prince of Darkness. Running through this is the thin thread of reporter Lois (Margaret Gerard, who would go on to marry director Trenchard-Smith), who smells a story about workaholics and rock music, or something.
The threads barely connect, but inevitably, the family that stunts together rocks together, and after letting himself get set on fire for TV and film, he takes on this challenging role in concert, forced by The Prince of Darkness to be burned alive before (spoiler alert) he appears alive and triumphant.
On paper, this may not sound like much of a movie, or maybe too much of a movie, and you’re both right.; if the stunts were tiresome and the rock tedious, there would be nothing to hold on to here. But Sorcerer gives great good-vs.-evil spectacle, and if their lyrics are stoopid and the music stoopider, well it’s really good stoopid. And if shots of the daredevil Page are repetitive, then Trenchard-Smith shows you these high-fire acts in split screen, sometimes showing different angles but other times showing the same angle of a man burned alive plunging toward the camera and certain death.
Naturally, Stunt Rock opens with a disclaimer warning viewers not to try any of this at home, which presumably goes for making your own thumping wizard-themed proto-punk as well. But all this silliness is conveyed with so much energy, from the flailing frizzy hair to Page’s derring-do multiplied twice and even three times. You kind of forgive the tacked-on love story, which makes you wince almost as much as the sight of Page climbing another wall without a harness or walking a tightrope between high-rise apartments without a net or—an apparent specialty of his—being doused in gasoline and set on fire again.
Trenchard-Smith went on to make other titles like BMX Bandits and Dead End Drive-In, which along with this stunt-rocking showcase was featured in the highly entertaining 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!. Whatever you may expect from Stunt Rock, it delivers exactly what it promises in all its ridiculous, death-defying, sideburned glory.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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