Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park

I can remember in 1978 when this movie came out. It was aired on October 29th, just 2 days before Halloween. The anticipation for this movie was kind of like being a kid at Christmas time. You know on Tuesday of this week that Rudolph is on Friday of next week. The days can't go by quick enough, and you anxiously await for it to finally air. Well finally, it did. At 12 years old, and being a huge KISS fanatic, that was the best movie ever. I can remember the next day, every kid in the neighborhood talking about the movie, and for about a week, playing KISS vs their robot doubles. To the hard core KISS fan, the tunes rocked. Rock And Roll All Nite started off the opening credits. Again....at 12 years old, it was magic.

Now enter 8 years later. The age of the VCR's, and cable TV. I had noticed in TV Guide that KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park was going to be on....next week. Just like 1978, I had to go through the anticipation phase again. But the night finally came, and I had the VCR and brand new tape all set. My movie finally aired. I watched it.......and it was totally and completely one of the most dumbest movies I had ever seen in my life. Needless to say....the movie didn't have the same impact on me as it did 8 years prior. I had come to realize that aside from wasting my money on a blank tape, I had just wasted 2 hours of my life that I will never be able to get back. The songs were still great, and the concert footage was good, but the acting was absolutely horrible. At least Gene went on to do a couple better movies a few years down the road(Runaway, Wanted Dead or Alive).

Because of this disappointment I experienced, I had come to the decision that I would never buy this video. I have since seen it on Ebay, record stores, movie stores, etc. And for cheap money at that. But I know deep down inside I'll either never watch it, or I'll start to watch it and get bored rather quickly. I find it better to hold it as a childhood memory.

In a note to the previous posting about Peter Criss' voice being re-dubbed because it was awful.....perhaps. The real reason is (as stated by Paul Stanley of KISS in the KISS home video Extreme Closeup)...the reason for the different voice is because....after the filming of the movie, the band had to go back to the studio to do what was called looping (re-taping their voices). Peter Criss would never show up, so another person had to do his voice.

KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK... what a film! I first encountered this film as a Movie-Of-The Week on TV when I was about nine years old. I thought it was great then, of course, because back then (late '70s) ANYTHING Kiss-related was "great." When I saw it again years later on the late movie I found it hard to keep my drink from spraying out of my nose while I laughed hysterically through the entire movie. I ran out and found the movie on VHS the next day and spent many a happy Saturday night during college exposing my friends to this underrated gem. It became a surrogate "Rocky Horror" midnight movie for the metal heads in my dorm. The other posts on this movie have already beaten the "plot" (or lack thereof) to death so I don't need to berate it any further. Let's just say this: the script is hilariously bad, as are the performances, the special effects, etc., etc. But for KISS fans this is mandatory viewing at least once. In fact, I use this film as a litmus test when speaking to other KISS fans to find out how hardcore they are. I ask "Have you seen KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM?" and if they answer "Yes," I ask "How many times?" If the answer is more than five times, then I know I'm in the company of a hardcore member of the KISS Army. The band may hate this movie (I believe they even sued a DVD distributor recently for releasing the film on DVD and had it taken out of circulation) but I simply can't get enough of the Star-Child ("you're looking for someone...but it's not KISS"), Space Ace ("Insufficient data, Starchild! ACK!"), the Demon (There ARE no right hands but OURS!"), and the Cat Man ("Gene's brother was an only child!")in action. It's a bad movie to end all bad movies. I love bad movies, and I love KISS, so for me it's a match made in heaven.

With tunes like "I Stole Your Love" and "Shout It Out Loud". This movie leaves no stone unturned for Kiss fans. It's so period, so dated, yet completely fun (especially if you're a nostalgia freak). Yet another one of those films where technically the acting stinks, the script is lame and the set is an amusement park but you just have to watch it once or twice or again and again. Choice is yours! (but I'd check it out:) As a Kiss fan I have no choice but to stick it a 10.

Consider this: In 1978 Wonder Woman was a fairly decent sized hit TV series. Cheese and camp were in. KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park originally was planned (and scripted) as "Star Wars meets A Hard Day's Night." Unfortunately, the network censors decided that it was too violent and too serious for all the kids that would likely be watching, so the script was toned down. After 3 or 4 re-writes the script hardly resembled that which the band and their management agreed to, but they had already signed their contracts, so...

Out came KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park to TV screens in the Fall of 1978. It was bad, unintentionally funny in spots, and yet - it was still kind of cool if you "got it." The idea of KISS as superheroes was a natural, and, in fact, it followed the two Marvel Comics KISS special issues from 1977 & 1978 - including the idea of where they got their powers. There are some ideas in the story that if fleshed out and written well could have made for a good TV movie. Unfortunately Hanna Barbera was running the show, and turned it into a live action cartoon - with the approval (and outright urging) of NBC. The band so hated the script that even Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons - the guys in the band with good work ethic and aspirations of becoming serious Hollywood actors someday - didn't bother to study their lines. They just had their lines barked out to them and repeated them for each take. Peter Criss, as has been noted many times, didn't even bother to show up for the "looping," or overdubbing of his voice to fix the spots where the audio recording wasn't up to par (and had his voice replaced by a cartoon voice actor throughout the film as a result). Ace Frehley also seems disinterested for most of the movie (and as he was, and still is, a big Science Fiction fan that shows just how unhappy he was with the script - and the film-making process in general).

Anthony Zerbe and Carmine Caridi, however, do their best to salvage something out of this mess. They give solid, fairly believable performances despite dialog that is often cheesy, and despite their characters being written as cardboard cut-outs rather than 3 dimensional people. Kudos to them, they clearly were (and still are) professionals.

The highlights of the movie end up being the music and the cheesy fight scenes - and maybe the interplay between Zerbe's Abner Deveraux and Caridi's Calvin Richards. KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park can be fun to watch IF you go into it expecting a cheesy 70's superhero camp movie. If that's all you expect, then it meets and exceeds those expectations. It's a great bit of nostalgia as well.

KISS survived this movie, but just barely. A year later they had a huge hit with their Dynasty album, but then saw Peter Criss leave the band, with Ace Frehley following suit a couple of years later. They saw their fortunes fade for a few years (despite the introduction of the late, great Eric Carr on drums in 1980) before their career revival minus the make-up with albums like Lick It Up, Animalize, Asylum, and Revenge. In 1996 the original group got back together for a wildly successful reunion that lasted for 5 years. Once again, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley proved to be too unstable and erratic to continue in the band, and they each ended up leaving KISS (or being asked to leave) for a second time. Despite a "Farewell Tour" in 2000-2001 KISS still continues today, and they still hate this movie. But like a veteran telling war stories, they still tell the tale of making this movie, and of how a great idea was turned into something profoundly stupid yet still strangely compelling.

...or is that a "master piece"? Either way, I loved it. How all 4 members were completely ignored for "Best Actor" Oscars is beyond me.

How can you beat a movie that has an "evil KISS" out to ruin the real KISS, so they go on stage at a KISS show and change the lyrics of the classic tune "Shout it out Loud" to "Rip and Destroy", to the dismay of the packed Amusement Park, who don't know there's something amiss, so they start booing the evil KISS, thinking it's the real KISS ruining their own song by changing the lyrics (how's THAT for fan loyalty?), etc, etc....I could go on.

Let's just say...this IS A CLASSIC FILM!! Rent it!! Thank you very much.