KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)

To be perfectly honest with you, I didn't really care for KISS back in the day.

Nothing against them but, for a young impressionable Dope, it was just not the music I was used to at the time. After all, I was only...well...young. I mean, here were these guys with stadium hair and weird names, dolled up in black-and-white makeup and playing their guitars too loud, singing too loud, spitting fake blood on the stage, biting the heads off of pigeons, blowing up goats with dynamite...

Oh wait, that was someone else.

Anyway, I simply didn't understand these yahoos that the rest of the world thought were so wonderful and talented and so forth, but there must have been SOMETHING about them - after all, they were the top rock act of the Seventies, the greatest rock-and-roll group in the world, blahblahblah...

So I was on the far end of the spectrum, I guess - the one that just didn't "get it". I was stuck in the world of easy-listening and wondering when Al Stewart would be getting his own movie.

But there they were: Gene, Pete, Ace and Paul, hair and all, riding the tops of the charts and cranking out one hit vinyl after another...vinyl albums, sigh...and plastered on the bedroom walls of swooning young girls and head-banging young boys with guitars and dreams. They pretty much had it all.

Then a funny thing happened: in 1976 "The Paul Lynde Halloween Special" debuted on ABC, and on it was Betty White, Florence Henderson, Donny and Marie Osmond, Billie Hayes (in full Witchie-Poo rigging), Margaret Hamilton (as everyone's fave witch from Wizard of Oz) and...wait for it...KISS, ladies and germs! Yep, this was their big television debut and, singing three songs and interacting with Paul and company, they seemed to be pretty comfortable with it all.

So, why not give them their own full-fledged television thing?

[STUDIO SUIT] Not a concert or anything like that, though; those things just get too wild with the kids nowadays in their blue jeans and feathered hair all shouting and whooping it up and, heavens, if the boys start eating animals on stage, well, the Christian groups will just get all in a lather, don'tcha know, and then we'll have to fend off all the huffy letters from concerned parent groups, and we're still recovering from the time we started that Heidi movie just before the Super Bowl was over and, oh, then if we let the KISS do their little concert thing then we'll have to make concessions with the Black Sabbath there and the Blue Oyster Cult there, but them Boston boys seemed very nice and groovy, though, don'tcha think?....[/STUDIO SUIT]

Not a problem, since NBC gladly took the chance to get the group onto their network at any price. Why? NBC was going through a time where their shows were flagging badly - remember, children of the Seventies, this was the era of Fred Silverman and such vehicles as "Hello, Larry", "Grandpa Goes to Washington","The Waverly Wonders", "The Eddie Capra Mysteries" and "David Cassidy: Man Undercover" (and no, the last one wasn't a cartoon - maybe it should have been....).

So, a chance for a floundering network to have a movie special featuring one of the hottest rock groups of all time? Ab-so-lutely!

[STUDIO SUIT] Oh, but we gotta be careful, though, because we got to cater to our sponsors and then there's our demographic we have to remember, too; after all, they pay our wages and we have to make them happy, those kids out there with the acne and the money they get from their parents to pay for the product we sponsor during the breaks there - gotta keep 'em happy and watching and remembering our network slogan, whatever it is this week, there... [/STUDIO SUIT]

A very valid point - what kind of movie would it be? What would be best-suited to feature a heavily made-up group of rockers such as these - AND make sponsors happy AND the audience glued to their collective TV sets?

Why, just make the members of KISS a group of evil-fighters with special powers who do battle against an evil genius who plans to destroy the amusement park from which he was just recently fired.

Of course.

Naturally.

Makes all the sense in the world.

Hello, Emmy Awards.

Get ready to rake in the big bucks.

Nielsen families, brace yourselves for....

OH, WHO THE HELL ARE WE KIDDING????

KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park came out at a time when KISS was also the subject of a Marvel Comics series wherein they played themselves being superheroes. Original. I think Donny and Marie had the same deal going at DC. But there is your idea, and there's pretty much the whole plot, but with a few detours along the way.

Allow me to get into detail here: Abner Devereaux (Anthony Zerbe) is a brilliant scientist who works at a big-deal amusement park in designing semi-realistic mechanical creatures (like guys on platforms who do the robot, a gorilla in chains who rocks forward and backward, a barbershop quartet, samurai warriors and so forth). He basically gets the boot early on after complaining about his funding getting cut because the owner of the park (Carmine Caridi) is putting all his bucks into advertising the fact that KISS is coming to do a concert. Abner swears revenge, storms away, blahblahblah...

Meanwhile, empty-headed cutie Melissa (Deborah Ryan) is looking for her equally empty-headed boyfriend Sam (Terry Lester), who disappeared while working for Abner in his underground research facility. Now there's three words that almost never bode well for a minor character in a movie. They're very much in love, judging from the opening scene where they're riding a roller coaster and kissing and pawing each other. Ah, young Seventies love. Anyway, she spends the running time of the movie searching the whole park over for Sam, blahblahblah...

Also, three toughs...or maybe they're bikers or gang members...I can't really tell what they're supposed to be, but they do wear a lot of denim and leather and talk tough. Maybe they're just punks.... Anyway these three whatever-they-are, named Chopper, Slime and Dirty Dee, push people around, mess with the exhibits and talk in tough language for a family hour TV movie. Maybe they're not punks either - just jerks. But they are eventually lured into a scary castle exhibit by Abner, until they realize too late that something's wrong, blahblahblah...

And, after about 30-45 minutes of this plot-filler junk, THEN the titular band that this movie's supposed to be about shows up. What is the deal with this; it's about as bad as Godzilla Vs. Megalon, where Godzilla doesn't show up until the last half-hour of the film.

KISS does make quite an entrance, exploding onto the scene of their concert. I mean, literally exploding, with flashes and smoke and everything. They sail out of the sky, beams shooting out of their eyes, walking down on laser dashes, breathing fire. They almost immediately notice Melissa asking the three ineffectual park guards if they've seen Sam and, with their powers of mind-reading, lip-reading and special effects-using, offer their services and say they'll help.

How nice. If this was the real KISS, however, Melissa would have almost surely become another footnote in the boys' books on all the groupies they loved before.

But this being an NBC made-for-TV movie, instead of a Lifetime Network movie, adjustments must be made. So there you have it - family-friendly glam rockers.

And speaking of the ineffectual park guards, it seems this is all the security they have for this huge park. One guy in charge (John Chappell) and two of his charges (one of them being future b-movie standby Brion James). What kind of security is this, since their main purpose is to act as irritants to the rest of the plot - if a movie like this can be said to have a plot?

Now Abner (remember him?), intent on making KISS the catalyst to destroy the park, tarnish their names and make him feel better about himself, designs robot lookalikes of our boys to fool the park guards (who do nothing anyway), incite the big concert crowd into a malicious riot and make the world unsafe for untruth, injustice and the Evil Scientist Way.

Abner even recruits a robotically-controlled Sam (remember him?) to do his bidding by taking pictures of KISS, steal a set of magical talismen (Talismens? Talismans? Talismi?) that give our boys their powers and otherwise stalk around the park at night, glowering.

[STUDIO SUIT] Now this is what we're talking about; a romantic subplot for the girls, technology for the Star Wars crowd out there, since we really need something to compete with that Star Wars special they're developing over at CBS for next month, and all we need now is lots of rock-em sock-em action for the boys, since they like lotsa action there...oh, but we gotta keep it safe for the kiddies there, too, because heaven knows they'll want to watch this here too, can't let them miss any of our advertising there.... [/STUDIO SUIT]

Not to worry on that point either, since this was not only scripted by the two writers who gave the exploitation world Too Hot To Handle, one of Cheri Caffaro's last soft-core sex and violence flicks (natural progression: from Ginger flicks to KISS) and directed by TV vet Gordon Hessler, who not only directed episodes of "Hawaii Five-0" and "Kung-Fu" plus films like The Oblong Box and Murders in the Rue Morgue but was also produced by Joseph Barbera...and yes, that's the same Barbera as in Hanna-Barbera, as in Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, all those cartoons, yep. So you see; all the avenues are covered - action with a cartoonish slant.

This means that Gene and company get to fight against robotic albino werewolves in silver jumpsuits - no worse than the costumes KISS wears - to a peppy disco-themed tune that's more suited to Scooby-Doo and the gang running away from creepy ghosts. Speaking of which, Hoyt Curtin did the music for all the big fight/action scenes in this film, if just to help win the all-elusive kiddie demographic. Must have been a carry-over from Joseph Barbera, just to keep in tune with all the cartoony elements of this thing.

Which is eventually what KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park turns out to be: one big live-action goof of a cartoon with some innate haunted house creepiness and action best suited to Saturday morning.

Do I dare mention the acting? With a title like this one, you shouldn't walk in expecting to see Lee Strasberg alumni. The only one who acts (or overacts as the case may be) is Zerbe, who at least evokes some sympathy as the antagonist. He's a good actor who's been in some good films (Cool Hand Luke, Will Penny, Papillon, The Dead Zone) and some bad ones (Soggy Bottom USA, Steel Dawn, Opposing Force, Listen To Me), but this is probably the biggest waste of an actor's talent since James Coburn advertised Schlitz Beer.

And what of KISS? They appear, sing three songs, a couple of them were so unreliable that one (Peter Criss) was dubbed and another (Ace Frehley) had a stunt double/stand-in actor that not only looked nothing like him but was also a different race (during the werewolf fight scene, see if you can notice what I'm talking about). In fact, Ace refused to work with the screenwriters and instead just made odd sounds whenever they asked him what kind of dialogue he would prefer in some scenes. Which is why at some points Ace simply says "Awk!" in response to some questions or even just squawks for no other discernible reason.

Paul Stanley plays Paul Stanley playing Star Child well enough. He bests his compatriots in acting if only for the sole virtue of not looking as ridiculous as they when saying lines like "It must be feeding time for The Demon," and "Hi, Curly!"

At least Gene looks menacing. But when you have bushy hair, wear foot high platform boots, breathe fire and speak in a growling echo, how could you NOT be menacing?

Even to this day, the Knights In Satan's Service absolutely and unequivocally hate, detest and deride this film, slamming it even now and refusing to even so much as answer a question which refers in whole or in part to KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. And who can blame them? It did nothing to further anyone's career, rated merely a blip on any KISS fan's radar and didn't even help NBC at the time of its premiere.

[STUDIO SUIT] Ooh gee, I wonder what went wrong with this here; we hit all the right notes and pushed all the right buttons, got the kiddie audience and KISS fan audience and even had some of them impressive effects the kids like nowadays, but we still didn't even pull in any bigger numbers with this than we did with McLean Stevenson hosting our premiere network showing of Godzilla Vs. Megalon there...or maybe we didn't get the right demographics from the bean-counters division, over there....[/STUDIO SUIT]

Well, the plain fact of the matter is this: when your product is so shoddy and junked-up with subplots and unimportant characters that no music group, no matter how big, can overshadow any of the script's shortcomings, you have more problems than robotic albino werewolves in silver jumpsuits and non-acting. You have a major case of over-reaching with a lot of under-achieving thrown in.

And on that count, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park hits all the right notes. Unfortunately.