'Cum On Feel the Noize' - Movie Review

The movie is named after the Slade (and Quiet Riot) song "Cum On Feel the Noize," but in Canada it was released as "Come On Feel the Noize." The intent of the movie is to chart the development of heavy metal as a music genre.

Where this falls apart almost immediately is the voice-over. This is a German production with a German director and a German writer. Which suggests it got a bad translation into English, and a poor choice of narrator (according to the movie's own credits: "Gregory Fernandez," who isn't in IMDB's list of credits for the movie and doesn't appear to have really done anything else). What we end up with is something that sounds like a 1970s K-Tel ad. The movie says of Deep Purple's album "Infinite": "their biggest charting record in 30 years ... touring to sell to a whole new generation." The wording, the pacing, and the voice are all straight out of K-Tel - and it's pretty damn off-putting.

Another fairly significant mis-step occurred when they showed part of Twisted Sister's most famous song. The on-screen text credited it as "We're Not Going To Take" (sic). That's just sloppy.

The movie starts around 1970, and mostly credits Led Zeppelin as the real starting point of heavy rock. They talk about Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Slade ... They address the rise of punk (from which metal gets a lot of musical stylings) and glam rock (from which metal gets its on-stage theatrics). On the plus side, they did seem to get their history right. But then they kind of glossed over the diversity of subgenres that have developed - not that they would have had time to examine any of them closely, but just to point out that Neue Deutsche Härte happened (it's a German film!), that Death Metal and Nu Metal exist (they didn't mention Korn) ... And on and on.

The movie is occasionally (but sadly not always) interesting when the artists are talking. I particularly like Dave Draiman and wish they'd given him more time. But overall the movie is too surface to teach fans much, and too off-putting to keep non-fans of the genre interested. I really wanted to enjoy this one, but no such luck.