DVD Review: GWAR - Blood Bath and Beyond

(2006, DRT Entertainment)

You know, this could have been a really good DVD. GWAR has been around for twenty-plus years now, and a video celebrating that fact should be a can't-miss, no-brainer kind of situation, but it seems like all the stars aligned perfectly to prevent that. Ideally, there could have been some huge, all-encompassing retrospective, with all sorts of rare footage, music videos, interviews with past and present members. (and there are a lot of those) There could also be TV appearances, like the band's appearances on the Jerry Springer Show, GWAR being profiled on a VH1 "Where Are They Now?" segment, Danyell Stampe's (better known in her GWAR days as Slymenstra Hymen) post-GWAR appearance on Ripley's Believe it or Not, Oderus Urungus being interviewed by Beth Littleford on The Daily Show, or Oderus and Beefcake showing up on the Joan Rivers Show in 1990. All aspects of the band/traveling circus's screwed-up history could be explored, from their beginnings when punk rock scumbags from the band Death Piggy hooked up with aspiring special effects scumbags Hunter Jackson and Chuck Varga, to their peak in the 1990s, when Beavis and Butthead helped make them almost household names and they were twice nominated for a Grammy Award, to their current exploits making emo kids really nervous on the Sounds of the Underground tour. From Dave "Oderus Urungus" Brockie being threatened with deportation by Charlotte police over the Cuttlefish of Cthulu, (Which for those of you not cultured enough to know, is basically part of Oderus's costume that's used to spray the audience with various liquids that also doubles as a giant fake wang.) to Slymenstra Hymen getting in the Guiness Book of World Records for her fire-breathing exploits, to the original Sexicutioner costume allegedly sinking to the bottom of an angry sea with everything else in Chuck Varga's ill-fated house boat, this is a band with a lot of ground to cover.

The problem is, virtually none of that is on here.

The reasons I can think of are twofold, with the big one being money. Dressing up as a barbarian from space and putting on an ultra violent, borderline pornographic heavy metal show just doesn't pay as much as it used to, and the truth is, it never paid that well to begin with. Even back in the 90s, when their albums regularly sold in the hundreds of thousands, times were lean, with the usual "our label fucked us" story in full effect. At the time, GWAR's album sales were probably second only to maybe Cannibal Corpse's on the Metal Blade roster, and aside from the little bit of Slayer stuff Metal Blade still had the rights to and that one Goo Goo Dolls album, (that Metal Blade head honcho Brian Slagel allegedly kept all the royalties from, as well) those two bands were essentially funding the entire label, from the way Dave Brockie makes it sound. So even with GWAR selling a relative crapload of records, videos and other assorted bits of merchandise, showing up on national TV shows, and being featured in Super Nintendo games, they weren't exactly swimming in Scrooge McDuck's money bin. And once Metal Blade got a clue, decided to not miss the boat like they did with the 90s "nu-metal" thing, and stocked their roster with flavor-of-the-month, generic metalcore/screamo/blah whatever bands who sold CDs like hotcakes to really stupid kids, GWAR's services were no longer needed, and they weren't exactly sad to leave. Thing was, DRT Entertainment hasn't been much better, and according to Don "Sleazy P. Martini" Drakulich, the label currently owes them $12,000 for their most recent album, (Beyond Hell, which wasn't that bad, really) and seems to just be banking on going out of business before someone forces them to pay up. So yeah, acquiring the rights to all that TV footage and getting everything together for the DVD I envisioned a paragraph ago probably just isn't financially feasible with things the way they are.
The second problem is possibly even a bigger one, and it's more of an internal thing, to boot. A few years ago, there was this big blowup within Slave Pit, Inc., (The group of various musical and artistic types that are responsible for GWAR and all related projects) mainly between founding members Dave Brockie (once again, better known as Oderus Urungus, the lead singer/song writer, only remaining original band member, and heavily involved on the artistic side of things) and Hunter Jackson (known on stage as either Techno Destructo or Scroda Moon, depending on the tour, and while he didn't play an instrument and rarely provided vocals, was pretty much the main guy on the artistic/prop-making level) which ended in Jackson getting supremely pissed off and leaving. GWAR continued as always, with Slave Pit behind-the-scenes types Matt Maguire and Bob Gorman picking up his slack, and Don Drakulich returning as a non-touring part-timer, but a pretty major problem arose: You know all that old footage, like some of the unreleased videos and neat, rare, archival crap? Guess who owns the rights to almost all of it: Yup, Hunter Jackson. So when the band's 20th anniversary came around, available source material was on the thin side, to say the least. The result of all this was the Blood Bath and Beyond DVD.

That's not to say that there isn't some cool stuff on here. Just about all the old footage on here either has never been seen before or hasn't been seen in a long time, and the segments in between, with Oderus and Sleazy, in costume and in character, are hilarious. There's footage of an early incarnation of GWAR, with the band basically looking like regular humans in Conan/Mad Max type outfits, terrorizing the streets of Richmond, culminating in Oderus Urungus (who at the time, looked suspiciously like one David Murray Brockie wearing a spiked hockey helmet) essentially cutting a wrestling promo on Cardinal Syn, one of the band's more prominent villains in the band's stage show. From the same time period is some live footage, featuring Oderus on guitar and Joey Slutman (Joe Annaruma, in real life) on vocals, a battle with a giant roach monster, (ending with the introduction of a giant can of Raid, naturally) and the early GWAR being greeted by Sleazy P. Martini (notably missing his giant plastic hair) and given a brief case full of coke. There's also a rundown of the various enemies the band has faced on stage, ranging from Techno Destructo to Cardinal Syn to Edna P. Granbo and the Morality Squad to Gor-Gor, the band's pet T-Rex that has to be put down after Oderus's "watch me put my head in the Tyrannosaurus's mouth" stunt goes horribly awry. Things get ugly fast on a section of the video appropriately called "That's Fucked Up," which explored the more, well... fucked up things GWAR has done on stage to their many foam rubber/latex victims, including Oderus deciding to terminate Slymenstra's pregnancy on stage and Father Bohab having a giant cross used on him in ways that would get me kicked off the internet if I explained them. All of this is done in what would be graphic detail if big hunks of foam rubber being thrown around could really be considered "graphic." These aren't normal people we're dealing with, you know?
And yeah, I guess to the dedicated GWAR fan, (and they do exist, trust me on this one) these are really nice things to have on a DVD, but sometimes, the presentation is lacking. While the live footage is mostly bootleg camcorder stuff, it really doesn't look that bad, but there's the annoying tendency for it to be shown fading from one clip to another in rapid-fire succession, often changing before you catch what was going on in a previous clip, and more often than not, the real audio isn't present. Instead, it seems to be a mix of audio from the official "Live From Mount Fiji" live album, the unofficial "You Are All Worthless and Weak" live album, and the studio versions of the songs involved. The outcome of this is a mix of footage that's hard to pay attention to and music you've already heard, and one would be hard-pressed to say whether or not the end result was worth twenty bucks.
Bonus material is kind of thin as well, but it's not without its moments. On one hand, there's "Captain Pike," which is this weird thing involving Sleazy P. Martini on stage with some sort of robot thing based on the original captain of the Star Trek Enterprise, blinking lights in tune to the Soft Cell version of "Tainted Love," that's funny as hell for like thirty seconds but seems to last eight hours, and "Filthy Chunks," which is this really weird horror movie/simulated porn thing involving Oderus and the Sexicutioner doing more things I can't mention on the internet to people made out of various forms of foam rubber. It clearly falls into the "okay, I really didn't need to see that" category, and even though that might have been the intent, I can't see myself ever watching that again, at least not on purpose. On the other hand, you get "Hell-O Again," which is a recent, really high-quality live video of GWAR doing a medley of almost everything from their first album, which sounds really good and includes inexplicable random footage of the Todd Evans version of Beefcake the Might riding a tiny little motorcycle around, and a pretty much never-before seen music video for "Poor Ole Tom," from the America Must Be Destroyed album, which most still consider to be the band's best work to date. (Honestly, We Kill Everything is my favorite GWAR album, which is kind of funny, considering that even the guys who were in the band and wrote the album think it sucked.)
Overall, this is something that's only for the hardest of the hardcore GWAR fans out there, and if you're only going to own one video release of theirs, this isn't the one to get. Hell, for about ten bucks more, you can get a four-pack with Rendezvous With Ragnarok, Tour De Scum, Dawn of the Day of the Night of the Penguins, and It's Sleazy, and that would be a much better place to start. Or you could, you know, buy one of their CDs, with anything from the 90s (mainly Scumdogs of the Universe, This Toilet Earth, and America Must Be Destroyed) and Beyond Hell all being fine choices. But honestly, unless you just can't live without three minutes of Joey Slutman singing or a rundown of GWAR's opponents in Mid-Galactic Championship Wrestling, you might want to steer clear of this one. And besides, if the things they say about DRT are true, they might not get paid for it, anyway.