Dirty Words: Interview with Mike McPadden, Author of HEAVY METAL MOVIES

Mike McPadden has been writing about sex, movies, and music for decades, and now he's ready to unleash his magnum opus: Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever!

Mike McPadden has been writing about sex and music since his zine Happyland first hit the after-hours office Xerox machines decades ago, and his hyperbolic mania first cracked the semi-mainstream with Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears (Feral House), in which he wrote “1999: The Year Bubblegum Snapped,” about his devotion to the Spice Girls. More recently, his love of heavy metal found expression in authoring If You Like Metallica ... (Backbeat Books) and contributing to The Official Heavy Metal Book of Lists (Backbeat) by Eric Danville. 

And now his magnum opus has just been published by Bazillion Points, Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! Every lover of music and movies will want to have this tome in their library, on their nightstand, by their toilet. Hell, buy multiple copies so it’s always within arm’s reach. McPadden’s enthusiasm is contagious, his knowledge starts on a cellular level and builds to a cathedral of his carnal desires in prose so alive that you can feel his heartbeat in every word. If this sounds like carnival barking, just read on, and decide for yourself. 

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Why metal and movies over, say, rock and roll or jazz or even hip-hop, all of which have a strong connection with film. Besides whatever personal affinity you may have, is metal intrinsically sexier, what with the leather and studs and all?

Metal is the most evil form of rock, and before Black Sabbath, rock had been the most evil form of music. The highest form of sex to me is that which goes most against God—meaning, specifically, lesbian tribadism, gay frottage, and heterosexual sodomy, in that order. Metal, therefore, is the sonic equivalent of those anti-ecclesiastical carnal transgressions. You know: the devil’s music… the devil’s sexy music. 

So there’s our leaping off point.

In terms of why I’d choose metal over rock or jazz, it’s because I’ve been a metal fan since 1975, when I first terrified myself watching Kiss on The Midnight Special when I was seven. I also got very horny over the girls in Kiss makeup on the cover of Love Gun. They seemed to be lezzin' out when that was a genuine novelty, like—"Gay girls?! Whoa!" Plus, I was, like, in third grade or something.

Over the past decade or so, my metal fandom has grown quite a bit. Metal’s been conquering the universe this century, and I’m a grateful conquestee. 

As for a book on rock movies—where would you start, and with rock itself being so limp and shriveled now, who would care? 

Hip-hop? It’s not for me. Peee-yuw, homie!

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In your exhaustive survey of heavy metal movies, what are some of the hottest examples of the hybrid genre you’ve found?

I saw the hard-R animated mind-and-wad-blower Heavy Metal in 1981, a month or so after turning 13. The boner I sported throughout that film at the Airport Plaza movie theater in Hazlet, New Jersey, remains legendary even in Hell.

Other than that, there are some classic hardcore porn films reviewed in the book, including an overview of the highly metallic Devil in Miss Jones series—and not just because I wrote the screenplay for The Devil in Miss Jones Part 5, although it didn’t hurt.

Traci Lords as the Devil in Gregory Dark’s New Wave Hookers from 1984 is one of the most metallic figures in all of cinema. But you better not use any of those pictures to illustrate this article, bucko. 

The most arousing segment of any Heavy Metal Movie, to me, is the Countess Bathory story in the 1974 erotic anthology Immoral Tales. Paloma Picasso plays the countess, a real-life Hungarian noblewoman who’s said to have bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth. Immoral Tales takes us inside her chamber of concubines, who are all these gorgeous European honeys with big fluffy muffs, some of whom get to lez out with the Countess before going in for draining. There are dozens upon dozens of these beauties piled up in this one room—all nude, all frolicking, all kinds of carefree and hairy. And then there’s a literal blood bath, so you have to kind of watch knowing that's in the offing. 

Countess Bathory is one of heavy metal’s most inspirational wellsprings, both in movie and music form. Musically, there’s the Venom song “Countess Bathory” and the pioneering black metal band Bathory to just name two of the most famous out of hundreds upon hundreds of examples. 

Countess Dracula is a Hammer horror film from 1971 starring Ingrid Pitt; she later reprised the role vocally on Cradle of Filth’s 1998 concept album, Cruelty and the Beast. In Hostel: Part II, Heather Matarazzo—who was Weinerdog in Welcome to the Dollhouse—gets naked and hung upside-down as a victim of Mrs. Bathory. And in 2009, Julie Delpy directed herself nude in The Countess. There are dozens of other Bathory movies, almost all very BDSM and lesbian heavy. I can go for that. Can do!

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You’re a movie maven, but even with your knowledge there must have been some oddball classic that slipped through the cracks. What were some of the more bizarre movies that surprised you?

Paganini Horror. It’s from 1989, and it is the goddamndest thing I’ve yet seen that's directed by Italian splatter movie maven Luigi Cozzi—and consider that he directed both of the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies. 

It’s about the early 19th century Italian violinist Nicolo Paganini, who was classical music’s preeminent heavy metal rock star—so much so he was called the “Son of the Devil” and the Catholic church was uneasy about giving him a proper funeral. He banged groupies, got loaded, mesmerized audiences with the intensity of his playing, people said he had sold his soul for the closest thing then to rock-and-roll—the works. 

Anyway, the movie starts in the present time with a mostly female rock group buying a possessed piece of Paganini’s music to record an album. That’s when the ghost of Paganini starts rubbing them out by way of his razor-sharp violin bow. Donald Pleasance shows up, too, looking more drunk than usual. The entire fucking thing is unbelievable.

Just as there are scream queens, are there actresses who have become known for representing metal babes or groupies, and who are your favorites?

Wendy O. Williams comes immediately to mind. She fronted the punk-metal shock squad the Plasmatics and made a fashion statement out of electrical-tape on her nipples. She’s great in the jokey 1986 exploitation movie Reform School Girls, although Wendy’s actual big-screen debut happens in the 1979 hardcore porn movie Candy Goes to Hollywood. There, during a parody of The Gong Show, Wendy shows off a talent she developed while performing in Times Square peep shows—she shoots ping-pong balls out of her vagina.

Linda Blair is ferociously metal. First, of course, because she was possessed little girl in The Exorcist. And then she followed that with three of the greatest, sleaziest teenage trauma TV movies ever made: Born Innocent, Sweet Hostage, and Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. Once she got past puberty, Linda developed into a super-bosomy exploitation movie queen by way of the 1981 horror movie Hell Night, the 1983 women-in-prison masterpiece—of ass—Chained Heat, and the 1984 rape-and-revenge blowout, Savage Streets. All are explosively heavy metal in attitude and impact. 

The metal McPadden is only the newest incarnation of your professional career, you currently work for MrSkin.com and have worked at Hustler. What was your introduction to the world of smut?

In the early 1990s, I published a zine called Happyland that largely chronicled the last days of Times Square as the epicenter of sleaze and sin in New York City. A friend of mine—the darling, beloved, and bombastically voluptuous Editrix Abby—was working at a local alt-weekly called The New York Press. She brought in Happyland, and I started writing for the Press. 

The NY Press’s art director, Michael Gentile, had previously worked for Hustler, so he recommended me to Allan MacDonell, then in the middle of his 20-year run at America’s Magazine. Allan and I hit it off and he hired me. I moved out to L.A. to work at Hustler full time in 1993. I lasted until 1996. And hey, everybody, read Allan’s book, Prisoner of X: Twenty Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. It’s great and he’s great.

Prior to moving, I also freelanced for Screw and when I moved back to New York, I labored at something like half-a-dozen slap mags throughout the second half of the ’90s. I got out during the dot-com boom, got bored with the straight world in 2002, and returned to the wank book biz to edit Celebrity Skin magazine. That’s where Mr. Skin found me.

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For a time you were a screenwriter for Greg Dark, penning some soft- and hardcore features, what were the main differences being a participant rather than a consumer of adult movies, and what are our main misconceptions of porn stars from your experience on set?

Gregory Dark was one of porn’s preeminent directors in the ’80s and ’90s. He later went on to be the #1 music video director in Hollywood at the turn of the century. He started out directing clips for the Melvins, then Sublime, then Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and the Backstreet Boys. I came in at the end of his porno era and departed before he started making MTV bucks. 

I wrote, I think, four hardcore movies for Greg. One of them, The Devil in Miss Jones 5, is pretty great. I still have fun when I watch it once a decade or so. The rest are negligible, although I’ve actually met fans of a mess called Sex Freaks online. 

The one softcore movie I wrote was Animal Instincts 3: The Seductress. It’s about a voyeur record producer who pretends to be blind so he can watch his unfaithful wife screw around without her knowing he’s in on it. The movie is terrible, but I kind of love it. It’s also a Heavy Metal Movie due to a shredding guitarist character named Trick Willy. Throughout 1997 and 1997, I swear that thing aired on Showtime after 1 a.m. every single night. 

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You lived through the end of the smutty Times Square, with windowless peepshows and crack den grindhouses, and you chronicled that sad fading out in you fanzine Happyland. What were some of the more explicit acts of depravity you witnessed before the flame was extinguished?

I saw a lot of depraved acts of human desperation in those dumps, including a line of guys waiting in a blowjob line outside a basement men’s room at the Venus theater. What a pit of shit! After each comer, the Venus fellationist on duty spit her sploogey prize into a bucket on the ground next to where she was kneeling. I think she was saving it up—like Countess Bathory did with blood. 

The Harem theater was the single most disgusting environment I, or anyone, has ever made it out from alive. I used to say that the STDs there had sprouted wings and you had to swat them away like flies throughout your visit. Anyway, a hooker at the Harem once propositioned me with a fifty-cent oral treat if I would just follow her “behind the screen.” I imagine if I had, I’d still be buried beneath whatever presently stands on 42^nd Street in place of the Harem theater. 

Show World, which deemed itself “the McDonald’s of Sex”, was the real class of the crop. I was tight with one of the dancers there, and she beamed a very proud smile at me once as I sat in the audience and she fisted a jugsy Puerto Rican chick during their lesbian dance show at the facility’s Triple Treat Theater. I also saw Russ Meyer mamazon Kitten Natividad do her bathtub routine at the Triple Treat in 1988. That certainly was a treat. 

Married, employed and with a couple of books published, how do you get your kicks nowadays?

This is my circuit of high thrills: Quimby’s Bookstore in Wicker Park, Dante’s Pizza in Logan Square, the Cascade Drive-In in West Chicago, the Music Box theater in Wrigleyville, the Logan Theater right near my house, and two miniature golf courses out in the suburbs—Par-King and, of deep personal importance, the Bunny Hutch. The latter is where I got engaged in 2010; right on the Frankenstein hole. 

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Before we let you go, would you recommend some of your favorite dirty books?

I discovered The Joy of Sex in my parents’ nightstand in 1977, chock full of illustrations of hippies getting it on. I’ve had a pronounced fluffy armpit fetish since then. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

Other than that, Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese is a meistürwürk of you-are-there reporting from the ’70s sexual revolution that exploded my preadolescent overalls. 

And the mighty Tales of Times Square by Josh Alan Friedman remains one of the great reading experiences anyone can have. That book put me on my career path and ignited my lifelong passions as surely as anything else ever did. So, I guess, be careful. 

Buy "Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever!" by Mike McPadden Here!

McBeardo author photo by Chris Roo