After screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is to go on general release in Australia in September. Yesterday there was a special screening at the Nova in Carlton followed by a chat and Q&A with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner from the band and the film’s director Sacha Gervasi, which I attended.

Releasing their first album independently in 1981 and cited as influences by Metallica, Slayer and others who went on to great success, Anvil were in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the resurgence of Heavy Metal worldwide in the 80s. However twenty years later, despite still releasing albums, they were forgotten by all but the most diehard fans and metal rocknerds. So what went wrong? That’s what Gervasi, an old fan of the band, wanted to find out. I found the film inspirational; while there are moments in the film which could have come straight out of This Is Spinal Tap and leave one cringing, at the film’s climax (a word one is hesitant to use when discussing Lips, infamous for his lewdness) the audience cheered, because unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil is made of real people.

Iron Maiden has a global fanbase, they even played Poland while it was still in the Soviet Bloc, but there is no better illustration of that than this film and what happened to me while I watched it.

The film, produced by  Sam Dunn, a metal fan and anthropologist, and Scott McFadyen who made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, covers the band on the first leg of their “Somewhere Back In Time” tour in 2008, and the first concert of the tour was in Mumbai, India. A guy sitting next to me in the cinema leant over as the film was starting and told me that he’d been at that concert and that he wondered if he ended up in the film. Tashi, as I later learnt his name to be, indeed ended up in the film in several audience shots and also in footage from their press conference in Mumbai.

The amazing cinematography, not just in the concert sequences but in aerial shots of Flight 666 (Iron Maiden bought their own Boeing 757 for the tour which carried the band, crew and all their equipment, captained by their singer Bruce Dickinson who has a commercial pilot’s licence), and almost access all areas to the band, their crew and the fans, make this worthwhile viewing even for those who are not fans of the band.

But for those that are, some of Iron Maiden’s most popular songs in DTS, combined with the concert and backstage scenes, makes the film as exhilarating as seeing them live. By the end of the film all the fans in the audience were singing along and clapped when the credits rolled.

Film site: http://www.ironmaiden.com/flight666/