Kiss's "Phantom" Menace

At this point I would like to return to the unpleasant subject of Kiss one last time before the ball drops in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday night, if only to drive the point home once and for all that honoring them at the Kennedy Center (now the Trump-Kennedy Center?) was a waste of everyone's time (including that of Cheap Trick), as well as respond to the inevitable complaint that Sylvester Stallone was the only actor to receive a Kennedy Center honor this year (unless you count Michael Crawford, who starred in How I Won the War, still a criminally underrated movie).  The guys in Kiss are also actors (which warrants another aside in parentheses . . . that was it!).  Kiss, it seems, made a movie together.  Some context:

The year 1978 was a bonanza year for the record business.  It was more profitable that year than at any year before in its history thanks to two soundtracks of pop movies produced by Robert Stigwood, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls, and a slew of Donna Summer releases.  What did Kiss do at this time? They put out those laughable solo albums and a greatest-hits compilation that offered a more contemporary remake of their song "Strutter" as a bonus track.  But it was not like Kiss had completely stayed out of the spotlight in 1978 as a single (allegedly) functioning unit, for it was in 1978 that Kiss made their first (and only) feature movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. Anthony Zerbe starred as the phantom opposite the Mehron face paint of Kiss, with their wearers in supporting role.

The movie sort of went like this: A Dr. Doom-like mad inventor is out to . . . take over the world? Well, I'm not sure, but I know it was some sort of (Professor) nefarious or (Dr.) sinister scheme. He works from his lair under the Magic Mountain amusement park in California, the movie having been set there because Coney Island, in Kiss's hometown, was too disco-roller-skate/Studio 54/salsa at the time for Kiss's whitebread Middle American audience.

Anyway, the Fantastic Four are needed to stop the phantom mad inventor, but they're not available, as they find the plot ridiculous, so Kiss, who have their own superpowers embedded in talismans, battle the phantom and his Kiss doppelganger robots . . .

 
WHAT??????????????????

 

. . . to try to stop them from . . . doing whatever it is they do.

An example of this movie's dialogue:   When the Gene Simmons doppelganger robot wrecks havoc in the amusement park and the police think the real Simmons is the culprit, the following exchange occurs between Ace Frehley and Peter Criss: "Maybe it was Gene's twin brother!"  "No, Gene's brother was an only child!"

That don't even make good nonsense.

Why did Kiss do this movie? Maybe they wanted to make their own equivalent of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Maybe Gene Simmons, a Dave Clark Five fan, wanted Kiss to make their own equivalent of Catch Us If You Can. Maybe they wanted to make their own equivalent of the Monkees' Head  but forgot to drop acid before filming. Maybe they were misled into thinking that Martin Scorsese would direct it. Maybe they decided to go the Elvis Presley route by making movies instead of touring. Maybe they wanted to one-up Alice Cooper, who had starred opposite a horribly aged Mae West in Sextette.  Maybe they saw that Hanna-Barbera was the production company and thought they'd be contributing songs to an animated movie like The Man Called Flintstone. Maybe they saw the 1970 Bee Gees movie Cucumber Castle and thought they could do something even cheesier. Maybe Simmons was jealous of the Kansas City R&B group Bloodstone, whose 1975 movie Train Ride to Hollywood featured Roberta Collins and Phyllis Davis, and Simmons hoped they could be in Kiss's movie so he could shag at least one of them.  Maybe doing a movie was in their contract with Casablanca Records.  Maybe Paul Stanley bet Casablanca boss Neil Bogart $100,000 that he couldn't get Kiss a movie deal and lost the bet.

I could make such conjectures all day (and would if I had more bandwidth), but even the Medved brothers couldn't explain all of the silliness in this movie, which was apparently made when Gene Simmons had an apparent illness that made him talk like a robot with an echo effect. The producers promised a movie that would be a cross between A Hard Day's Night and Star Wars, but anyone who's ever eaten an oatmeal raisin cookie will tell you that two things that are great on their own can be terrible when blended together (although vanilla cola is excellent). Unlike A Hard Day's Night and Star Wars, however, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was not theatrically released in the United States. It was instead aired on NBC on Saturday, October 28, 1978, for people who had nothing better to do on a Saturday night than watch something on TV other than "The Love Boat."  Alas, that includes me.  I was a week or so away from my thirteenth birthday, the folks were out and I was home by myself, and . . . well, it was something to do, wasn't it?

Airing it was the idea of NBC CEO Fred Silverman, who at roughly the same time also put a sitcom starring McLean Stevenson on the air in the wake of a CBS McLean Stevenson sitcom that failed (like Stevenson's NBC sitcom eventually did).  Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was just sort of crap that ABC and CBS wouldn't even consider airing on their own stations - and this was at a time when ABC aired sports competitions in which the athletes were stars of then-current TV shows, and CBS aired the infamous "The Star Wars Holiday Special."  On NBC, at a time when its programming sucked beyond recognition, it was one of the highlights of  Silverman's leadership.  (Aside: In 1981, Fred Silverman was fired as the head of NBC and Grant Tinker succeeded him.  Tinker's first directive order, rumor has it, was this - no more Kiss movies. And his second directive order was - no more McLean Stevenson sitcoms. 😄)

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (it makes sense that the title referred to Kiss in the singular person, since the group had become a singularly monolithic money-making entity) featured one "new" song - "Rip and Destroy," a call by the fake Kiss doppelgangers performing a Kiss concert at the amusement park to tear down the park for . . . well, I don't remember, probably to turn it into a nature preserve or something. Or maybe it was a call to stop another McLean Stevenson sitcom.  😄

 "Rip and Destroy" was only a "new" song in the sense that the lyrics were new. The melody was from their earlier song "Hotter Than Hell."

Needless to say, all four members of the original Kiss lineup would go on to disavow the movie, which serves as a cautionary flick for future bands to watch before agreeing to making a movie, and Paul Stanley can't even remember how the movie ended, even though he was integral to the final scene.  But - well, give them credit for trying something new, as they clearly hoped to make a rock and roll movie that harkened back to the days when rock and roll bands played themselves in broad comedic rock movies, like the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, and even Herman's Hermits had done,  but the rise of documentaries and concert films in the aftermath of psychedelia and the advent of more "serious" and musicianly bands in the late sixties and the early seventies had pretty much rendered that sort of rock film antiquated.  (The best and most successful rock movie of 1978 was the Band's The Last Waltz, a Martin Scorsese documentary of their final concert in San Francisco in 1976.)  Besides, how could anyone take Kiss's movie seriously when it got outclassed by another pop caper comedy which premiered that same month (October 1978) in the theaters?  Starring Donny and Marie Osmond?

Goin' Coconuts was better received by the critics and by the public.  Not well-received - just better received.

Maybe they should have cast McLean Stevenson instead of Herbert Edelman. 😁

Note: When Paul Stanley sang the line "Break it down and seal your fate!" when Kiss performed "Rip and Destroy" in their movie, I thought he was singing, "You got to see yo' face!"  Ah, Dada. 😄