Black Metal Veins (2012, Lucifer Valentine)

When his first film, "Slaughtered Vomit Dolls", came out I was admittedly impressed, somewhat, with Lucifer Valentine's 'experimental' and nightmarish style. Then came a few tiresome sequels that led to the "Vomit Gore Trilogy", as well as his cultivation of a ubiquitous cyber-fan base, consisting primarily of impressionable teenage goth girls. His repetitive and palaverous interest in indulging unenlightened online message-board kids with soulless 'shock value' quickly tainted my initial approach to his chaotic indie style. That said, I had heard a while back that he had a new, non-vomit gore project in the works about a clan of heroin addicted metal heads so I figured I'd give it a look...

For an undisclosed, but seemingly extensive, amount of time, Valentine hung out in an apartment full of junkies and documented their pathetic lifestyle. There's plenty of candid back story divulgement and drug life lowdown as the miserable group of degenerates inject, ingest and snort every substance they can possibly get their self-obsessed mitts on while whining about their anguished existences.

"Black Metal Veins" encompasses Valentine's familiar traits, such as distorted gutturals as background noise, jump-cuts and, of course, his fetish for rock bottom dope fiends. Aside from the latter, these elements of production are far less prevalent here, so the film plays out as more of a straight-forward documentary on addiction. This allows his signature characteristics such as those to add a touch of singularity to the harrowing material being presented. It's a pretty strong and effective doc that give you a truly lamentable first hand look at the result hopeless addiction and dissoluteness. It should also be noted that Valentine's need to exploit drug-addled losers for his reprobate 'freak show' effect isn't lost in his departure from "vomit gore". There are several "liberties" Mr. Valentine undoubtedly took whilst filming his crack head subjects, like staging the rape of a pregnant prostitute and even the death of one of his female "stars". I wouldn't doubt there being a few other specious elements within "Black Metal Veins", but I can't be 100% positive...

Also, if you're a black metal fan don't cream your leather studded shorts too quickly. Black metal plays a very insignificant part in this flick, aside from allowing these brain dead schmeckers something else to coldly babble about here n' there. There are also several instances (used as transitional cut-aways, mostly) where they are shown performing in a band, though it's never truly touched upon so I'm assuming it was just for show.

Overall, "Black Metal Veins" is easily Lucifer Valentine's most provocative film as far as I'm concerned, although it's not a total deviation from his puke flicks in terms of content, production and general tone. I actually saw a bit more 'merit' to this one and it bored me FAR less than his previous films. If you loved those then you'll certainly like this since it's got all of his familiar earmarks, minus the constant puking. So those of you who are SHOCKED by vomiting might be disappointed. Otherwise, I'd give it a moderate recommendation as a fairly interesting 'doc-sploitation'.