All you'll ever need to know about the Tenacious D movie

Chances are, you missed the here today-gone today flick Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny when it reached theaters a while back. But watching the trailers for Tropic Thunder and Kung Fu Panda put Pick of Destiny back into my consciousness (briefly), and it reminded me that said movie actually had a pretty metal beginning and end that were worth checking out.

No, the movie's not very good, and I'm saying that as a big fan of Tenacious D (the guys, their music and the TV show), Liam Lynch, rock n' roll and bad movies. A friend I saw it with summed up the movie's blunders perfectly--the band had come up with a plot and struggled to create songs around it, rather than the other way around. A patched-together movie based around their already great songs would've been a midnight classic, but instead Tenacious D wrote some just-OK music about a story that wasn't bad enough to be good. Still, you could never tell that this movie would suck based on the intro, which stars the incomparable Meat Loaf and the most excellent Ronnie James Dio.



A bunch of stuff happens in between that and their final rock-off with perhaps the best-ever onscreen Beelzebub, played Virginia's greatest son since George Washington. Or at least since GWAR.



That 666 drum kit really takes the cake.

In fairness, it's probably a good thing that the movie tanked--what would become of ultimate underdogs Jack Black and Kyle Gass if they started having #1 movies, MTV Awards and Rolling Stone cover stories? Instead, we get a couple of good moments, and hopes that Dethklok and Flight of the Conchords will be more careful.