Studio 666

  You may recognize the Foo Fighters as that band that put out that one really good song... Jesus, twenty-five years ago? The one with a video full of Evil Dead 2 references. I hear they've been active since then, not that we would know anything about that, haha, right? It's a band your father listens to, not a hip, with-it cat like me, daddy-O. Ahem. They've put out a few good songs throughout the years, half a great double album, that sort of thing. Or, umm, so they tell me.
 The band's known to like dad jokes - fooling around with dumb fake press releases and silly pranks, doing jokey videos with the Tenacious D folks and shit. At least that's what people who like this band tell me, I wouldn't know. And now they've gone and made a movie.
 Studio 666 is... well, can't really call it anything else than a vanity project, based as it is on a short story by frontman Dave Grohl that really did not need nor deserve a full motion picture treatment. There's no reason to justify its existence besides mixing those two passions of theirs: horror movies and dad jokes.

 Trying to do something special for their tenth album, the Foo Fighters retire to a big house in the hills of Los Angeles to record it. Unbeknownst to them, back in the nineties the house was used by the frontman of Dream Widow ('the next Jane's Addiction!') to summon a demonic entity via a doomy metal song and a book that looks suspiciously like Evil Dead's take on the Necronomicon. Oh, and he murdered the rest of his bandmates. Part of that is shown in a surprisingly legit pre-credits scene where Jenna Ortega tries to escape the house amid the bloody wreckage of her bandmates, only to get her head caved in with a hammer for her troubles. This movie does not fuck around with the gore, it's all (as you'd expect from the director of Hatchet 3) top-tier and extremely over the top. Over the top-tier.
 Adding to the legitimacy: a pretty cheap but cool-looking credits sequence with very John Carpenter-like keyboards that... oh, wait, yeah, it is John Carpenter! He also gets a small cameo.

 Enter the Foo Fighters, two decades and something later. Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, Nate Mendel, Taylor Hawkins, Rami Jaffee and Chris Shiflett, all playing some variation of themselves. All of them also self-aware to various degrees and, except for Grohl and Jaffee, looking mildly embarrassed to be there.
 The acoustics of the place are enough to convince them to stay to record their opus, but Grohl is stuck with writer's block. Stuck, that is, until he visits a creepy murderbasement and listens to an old recording; he ends up obsessed with it, and spends much of the rest of the movie trying to recreate it, becoming more and more a dick towards his bandmates. You can imagine where it goes from there.

 The tone is goofy and amiable, despite some pretty gnarly gore - it might disgust, but after its first five (very cool) minutes I can't imagine how any of it would scare anyone who's ever seen a horror movie. That's understandable, and it's an issue shared with pretty much every other horror comedy ever made. The problem is that the comedy side of things doesn't ever really materialize, either. Not that the movie is laugh-free - some of the band interactions are cute, and there's some low-key pleasure in watching Grohl behave like a prick and Shiflett get all sniffy about it, Pat Smear's complete inability to act, or Jaffee's complete and utter lack of basic modesty. But low-key is all there is because when the film does remember to deploy an actual joke or deliver a punchline, it's almost invariably pretty lame. A dad joke.

 And it absolutely doesn't help that, besides Grohl, everyone else kind of seems to be there against their will, unsure of how to fill all those minutes until they meet their inevitable demise. No one acts, everyone mugs to the camera; it must sting that the biggest laugh of the movie is stolen by a surprise cameo from a fellow non-actor musician.
 Grohl, bless him, brings a ton of energy. The others do what they can, with maybe the biggest surprise being Rami Jaffee, who does a pretty good job of portraying a very cartoony, broad new age goofball/horndog. To be clear, we're grading on a curve here, but he did make an impression. The few real actors in the film all play pretty minor characters, and even they can't do much with their given lines.
 This is disastrous in a one hour and forty-six minutes movie. Maybe if there were funnier situations, a bigger body count, a less generic plot that couldn't be summarized in two sentences... Anything.
 Grohl and co. are grappling with a few things here, mostly about how far out a frontman can get ahead of the rest of the band, and for a vanity project there's not a lot of self-aggrandizement involved; But they're not necessarily saying anything interesting, either, or saying it in an interesting way. At least you can tell that everyone involved was having fun, which... yeah, it does help, a little.

 The effects are a very mixed bag. The practical effects used for the gore, as mentioned, are a dark delight, not just in the execution but in concept as well; this is very clearly where the film shines. The CG effects used for all the other spooky stuff, though... let's just say they're less proper horror movie, more Insane Clown Posse Miracles video. But not as endearing.
 There's some flashes of interesting filmmaking, such as a hanging staged for maximum damage, or when Grohl first tests the acoustics of their new studio (cheesy, but cool). But on the whole it's just not a well made movie, especially when the band is involved; The very basic staging and blocking, along with the also very basic plotting and dad jokes, make the adventures of the Foo Fighters kind of feel like a 70's Scooby Doo cartoon. With graphic gore.

Oh hey, is this the bit everyone kept talking about in Whiplash?

 Bizarrely, the soundtrack is completely lacking in Foo Fighters songs, at least until the end credits. Maybe as a way to position this as more of a 'real' movie. The snippets of the doomy song we get are pretty good, though not nearly as good as the film makes it out to be. We do get some Gojira, a little Slayer... and, uh... some Jackyl.

 It's mildly -very mildly- likeable. There's some novelty value in seeing the Foo Fighters act as portray themselves. And it's very, very bloody. That counts for something in these parts.
 Other than that, though, I'd have to go with pretty bad.