Metal Lords

Netflix's sweet yet slight "Metal Lords" rocks ... sorta.

Film Yap is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

---

I’m not much of a metalhead. I have a predilection towards Guns N’ Roses as I grew up in Lafayette and West, Lafayette, Ind. like Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin did. I often listened to Rage Against the Machine to get hyped-up before football practice as a teenager. I got into the Deftones’ “White Pony” while in college. This is just about the extent of my metalheadedness, which likely means I’m not the target for “Metal Lords,” which begins streaming on Netflix beginning Friday, April 8.

Kevin Schlieb (Jaeden Martell of the “It” pictures and “Knives Out”) and Hunter Sylvester (newcomer Adrian Greensmith) are a coupla high school outcasts looking to form a “post-death metal” band called SkullFucker. Kevin drums in the marching band and knows about as much about metal as I do. Under the tutelage and financial stewardship of Hunter (who buys Kevin a drum kit that’d make Neil Peart blush from Guitar Center – hello, product placement! – with a pilfered Amex belonging to his plastic surgeon father (Brett Gelman, “Stranger Things”)), Kevin gets schooled in the art of rock.

The duo hope to participate in Glenwood Lake High School’s Battle of the Bands, but are in dire need of a bassist in order to do so. Enter Emily Spector (Isis Hainesworth of “Emma.” (2020)), a Scottish national and cellist who Kevin witnessed call their band director a cunt prior to quitting and chucking her clarinet into the ground. (How metal is that?!!!) As Kevin’s practicing and learning the ways of metal, he slides Emily some sheet music and learns she can shred … a romance blossoms between the two.

While she’s a cellist as opposed to a bassist, Kevin pitches Emily to Hunter for SkullFucker. Hunter’s dismissive of the idea insisting they’ll have “no Yokos” and that “having a cello player instead of a bass player would be completely gay.” Kevin and Hunter have a falling out during which Kevin drums for their poppy Battle of the Bands competition Mollycoddle fronted by Clay Moss (Noah Urrea) and is tempted to cheat on Emily by the comely Kendall Sarn (Analesa Fisher of TBS’ “Chad”).