Turn It Up!

Turn It Up!

Horror, comedy, sci-fi, and musical mayhem all rolled into one

AC is the lead singer of a struggling indie rock band. She and her friends have been trying for years to make it big, but success stubbornly refuses to come their way. The venues are empty, the bills keep piling up, and everyday life kills dreams more effectively than the factory job AC works to help pay the rent. One day, while rehearsing for yet another gig, the band accidentally comes up with a catchy guitar riff. At last, the audience starts to respond, and the music takes on a life of its own. There’s just one small problem. The melody is cursed. It opens a portal to another dimension, and nightmares start spilling onto the stage and into the audience. Heads explode, and every encore could mean the end of the world.

“Turn It Up!” is horror, comedy, sci-fi, and musical mayhem all rolled into one. Sam Scott’s film has the raw energy of a punk gig in a club where Lucifer himself apparently handled the electrical wiring. It’s a story about dreams, frustration, and the price of success, but above all about how art can open doors to places you’re better off never visiting. Scott throws rock ’n’ roll, grotesque body horror, absurd humor, and a love of B-movies into the same cauldron, then stirs it all with the confidence of David Cronenberg stumbling into a Pixies rehearsal while drunk.

The film’s greatest strength is its characters. Justine Nelson is terrific as AC, a singer torn between her dreams of being onstage and the realities of everyday life. She is joined by Gwenlyn Cumyn as Court, her friend and guitarist, with whom she shares a relationship far more complicated than either of them would care to admit. Hovering over it all is Julian Richings as the eccentric Dr. Pretorius. Richings does what he does best: he shows up and immediately cranks the weirdness up several notches. Sam Scott’s feature debut premiered at the Fantasia Festival and quickly won over audiences looking for cinema that is cheeky, inventive, and unpredictable. “Turn It Up!” cranks the amp all the way up and keeps playing until blood starts pouring from the audience’s ears.