Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, 1988
starring: John Martin
directed by: John Fasano

the plot: Rising heavy metal band Black Roses (fronted by Sal Viviano and backed by members of real-life metal group King Kobra) travels to sleepy Mill Basin to tweak their set before setting off to take over the world with their searing metal riffs. At least, that’s the official story. In truth, they’re a demonic group of evildoers with characteristically nefarious purpose. Night after night, show after show, the evil influence of Black Roses transforms the town’s teens into deviant metal-heads, making the leap from ordinary kids to violent and promiscuous rockers over the course of a week. It’s up to a high school English teacher (Martin) to break the spell and restore order.

why it’s good: “Black Roses” is about as far from good in the traditional sense of the term as you can get. But, because of its particularly crappy quality, “Black Roses” is a clear standout among heavy metal themed horror movies. Director John Fasano made his name in 1987, once again exploiting the popularity of heavy metal with the somehow even worse “Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare,” starring Canadian bodybuilder-turned-rock star Jon Mikl Thor. “Black Roses” stars no one you’ve ever heard of but features Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore in an early appearance where he is dragged kicking and screaming into a speaker cone by a monstrous demon. Ruthlessly awful from start to finish, the film amounts to 30 minutes of storyline padded with several dead-end subplots about rotten parents and the perils of conformity in small-town USA. The movie fills in its own nonsensical gaps with cheap excuses for nudity. This is an ’80s horror movie, after all, and no cheesy gimmick is spared. Also on the menu is a better-than-it-deserves-to-be soundtrack, mostly provided by King Kobra, whose singer disappeared in the early ’90s and then reappeared in the late ’90s as a transgendered woman.

why you should own it: To a true connoisseur of cheese, few horror movies are as uncompromisingly bad as “Black Roses.” It is a true artifact of a bygone era, an example of a subgenre that picked up steam. Moral crusaders of the ’80s hated horror and heavy metal in equal measure, and you’d think producers of the time would have seized on this notion with aplomb, but the combination of metal and horror is remarkably rare. It’s rarer still to find these films on modern video formats. The great Synapse Films has released “Black Roses” on DVD with a few items beyond the usual feature-and-trailer treatment. There’s screen test footage of the cast and a humorous commentary track in which Fasano and crew take digs at the movie with 20/20 hindsight.