It’s 1999. No one cares about KISS anymore. How about making a teen comedy about a bunch of kids that go to see a KISS concert in 1977? The timing of Detroit Rock City is bad – it comes on the heels of nearly a dozen other teen movies. It’s a gross-out comedy in a summer full of them and, worse, it’s an official KISS Nation production, "featuring Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss." Essentially, Detroit Rock City is a Kiss propaganda movie, which eliminates a lot of possibilities for humor and tones down a lot of others.
The protagonists of Detroit Rock City are four high school guys who hate authority, enjoy smoking weed and are absolutely obsessed with KISS. Something about it rings very hollow – I mean, how can you get stoned and then listen to KISS? And I thought the Foghat and Frampton in Dazed and Confused was a stretch. It’s a premise that requires suspension of disbelief, I guess, and once I got past it, I enjoyed the movie on a pleasant, superficial level.
Detroit Rock City is a likable movie with likable characters, and it covers 24 hours in the life of our protagonists, played by Eddie Furlong (giving his acting muscles a well-deserved vacation after American History X), James DeBello, Sam Huntington (the freakin’ loincloth kid from Jungle 2 Jungle) and Giuseppe Andrews. It happens to be 24 hours preceding a KISS concert, which is where our intrepid comic-book rock band comes in. Actually, and mercifully, Simmons and Co. don’t pop up until the last three minutes of the movie, and then just to sing the title song.
The problem? Huntington’s mom sets fire to their tickets in a zealous rage. It springs into motion a real Adventures in Babysitting series of events, most of them manufactured episodes of tastelessness. You’ll see a priest take shrooms, a kid seduce a girl in a confessional booth and a striptease that ends in a pitcher of vomit. I have a feeling Gene Simmons had a conference with the writers and told them to give the movie, "You know, that KISS feeling, that pure bottled rebellion we so love." Vomit and priests on drugs – that’s the extent of the KISS feeling.
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