New movies to stream this week: ‘Metal Lords’ and more
TWO high school best friends form a band in ‘Metal Lords’, a surprisingly sweet and unsurprisingly raunchy coming-of-age comedy starring newcomer Adrian Greensmith as the heavy-metal-obsessed Hunter and Jaeden Martell (‘It’) as his geeky, grudging drummer, Kevin. (The full name of the band cannot be printed in a family newspaper, but it contains the word ‘Skull’, naturally.)
Rounding out the central duo is Emily (Isis Hainsworth of ‘Emma’), a cellist with a mood disorder who becomes, in order, Kevin’s girlfriend and the band’s sort-of bassist. The three are all either bullied or otherwise outcasts, but they’re a likable crew for the most part. (Hunter can be a monomaniacal jerk about what being ‘metal’ – used here as a metaphysical adjective – means, but Greensmith delivers his character’s snark in an amusing way.)
The action centers on the buildup to a battle of the bands showdown, and while it’s predictable, it also takes enough detours to keep things interesting. The talented supporting cast includes Brett Gelman as Hunter’s plastic surgeon father and Joe Manganiello as a headbanger-turned-doctor who counsels Hunter after his father, in desperation, packs the kid off to rehab.
Hunter is as straightedge as they come, but he’s, er, a difficult child. His musical tastes feel very authentic – probably the result of Tom Morello serving as the film’s executive music producer and co-writer of Hunter’s signature song, ‘Machinery of Torment’, whose angst feels both hilarious and genuine. The former Rage Against the Machine guitarist also appears in a dream sequence, along with Rob Halford of Judas Priest and other veteran rockers, to give romantic advice to Kevin. It’s all very silly, but also dead serious, in the way that everything is when you’re a teenager.
*Available on Netflix. Contains strong language throughout. 98 minutes.
Also streaming:
In the spy thriller ‘Agent Game’, Dermot Mulroney plays a CIA interrogator who, after being scapegoated for an interrogation gone wrong, begins to suspect that a senior intelligence officer (Mel Gibson) has ulterior motives.
*Available on demand. Contains violence and crude language. 90 minutes.
A small-town teenager (Fatima Ptacek) develops a crush on a singer (Kane Ritchotte) whose punk band is performing in her town in ‘Coast’, a coming-of-age drama that also features Melissa Leo. “At times, particularly in the first half, the plot feels a bit aimless,” according to Film Threat. “There isn’t much to distinguish it from your average coming-of-age story, except for a pretty good soundtrack. Then things pick up, and ‘Coast’ starts to resemble ‘Thirteen’s’ punkrock little cousin.” *Unrated. Available on demand. 96 minutes.
Elisha Cuthbert (‘Happy Endings’) stars in ‘The Cellar’, a horror film about a woman whose daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new home, which turns out to be controlled by a malevolent entity.
*Unrated. Available on Shudder. 84 minutes.
From husband-and-wife directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (‘The Rescue’), the documentary ‘Return to Space’ looks at the history of how Nasa, after abandoning crewed space launches, returned to them with the help of private-sector innovation. The San Francisco Chronicle calls the movie “half stirring, real-life astronaut adventure and half infomercial for Elon Musk’s SpaceX business.”
*Available on Netflix. 128 minutes. — The Washington Post