DVD Review: My Time in the Thick Brick Cult

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 06 December 2012 05:00

Written by Renzo Adler

A mention of Troma Entertainment elicits one of two reactions: quizzical looks, or rampant enthusiasm. Troma is best known as the house that gave birth to The Toxic Avenger, a gory and raunchy series of films that filled video stores, and for a brief period in the early 90’s was also a poorly conceived children’s cartoon. Troma is also where I used to work.

When I started out there as a wee intern, I was approached by Justin Martell and Travis Campbell to help out on a movie. Not the new Toxie, or a sequel to Surf Nazis Must Die, but something called Mr. Bricks: A Heavy Metal Murder Musical. Oh yeah, and they also had to make the movie on the side while juggling a full time job (more on that later).

Mr. Bricks as a film really doesn’t fit in with the majority of low/no budget shock flicks you see these days. No slasher clichés drenched with winks and nods to validate their inadequacies.  No nouveau-gothic abandoned hospitals or asylums. Just stark, barren, industrial grey Queens and Long Island City provide the backdrop of this sordid tale.

Eugene 'Mr. Bricks' Hicks (Tim Dax) tries to re-call the events of a previous night after he wakes up in a hovel with a woman’s shoe in his hands, a bullet lodged in his head, and two men trying to dispose of him. He crosses paths with Officer Dukes (Vito Trigo) and Officer Scarlett Morretti (kinda-scream queen Nicola Fiore) as he spirals further down searching for the truth.

Bricks is played by tattooed muscle man, dancer, and fixture of many music videos, Tim Dax.

If I had to describe Dax’s performance in a single word, it would be “enthusiastic.” Dax doesn’t just brood or stand and look tough, he jumps, he swaggers, he screams, he cries, he’s all over the place! Dax’s flare is a little comic-booky, but it keeps the character interesting.

Mr. Bricks is a difficult film to categorize. Simply calling it a musical would be gross over-simplification, while calling it a horror flick doesn’t fit either since the horror is more about inner turmoil rather than dead bodies (don’t get me wrong though, there are still plenty of dead bodies in this movie).

The songs, while not exactly created by Meatloaf maestro Jim Steinman, are a melodic version of metal with some clearly enunciated lyrics so you can actually get an impression of what the characters are singing about.  The lyrics are what you would expect in metal fare, but there is enough humor and flare in them to keep them interesting. Besides, who can’t agree that “love is murder”?

You could call it an exploitation film, but thankfully, Mr. Bricks doesn’t indulge in obnoxious faux-1980’s flares that you see in movies that use the moniker “exploitation” these days. And while Mr. Bricks is not the most polished film you will see, it is a truly earnest effort by filmmakers that embodies Troma’s history of films that defy categorization.  

The earnestness of this production can be seen in the making of documentary on the DVD, Brick By Brick, where we see how Travis Campbell (Writer and Director) and Justin Martell (Producer) created this film with a shoe-string budget while also working full time jobs at Troma, drenching the production in espionage.  I’m also in Brick by Brick, since I was working at Troma when Bricks was being made, so I won’t lie when I say there is a personal tie that I have with this film and the tortures and triumphs the people working on it went through.

At the end of the day, Mr. Bricks is simply a film unlike any other. It might be a little rough around the edges, but it bravely traverses territory few have done before by making a gritty musical.

Mr. Bricks A Heavy Metal Murder Musical is out on DVD December 11, 2012.

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