Critic Reviews

Jason Lei Howden's directorial debut is primed for unalloyed genre thrills, making you laugh until your sides hurt and subverting the rom-zom-com format.

First-time writer-director Jason Lei Howden (who has a day job working for Peter Jackson’s special effects house Weta Digital) has delivered something amiably silly, liberally splattered with human viscera, and scored to the punishing grind of electric guitars.

Cawthorne's performance underpins the resulting power fantasy with genuine emotion.

In between the rampant four-letter words and the occasional partial nudity are likable attempts at humor — some sweet, some saucy.

Deathgasm is a giddy avalanche of gore and heavy metal-drenched mayhem that takes itself not even a tiny bit seriously.

Peppered with clever, self-referential one-liners that whip by almost too fast to catch them, Deathgasm is – like most metalheads/punks/Morrissey fans – a helluva lot smarter than one might at first suspect.

Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.

Gorehounds need not worry that a movie called Deathgasm plays it safe. This is a defiantly, well, metal movie.

This amiably dumb feature debut for New Zealand writer-director Jason Lei Howden could have used some additional polish on the scripting side to bump its bad-taste humor up from the routinely to the inspirationally silly.

A dopey splatterfest that features one-dimensional characters and a draggy first act that’s eventually won over by creatively immature gross-outs and absurd violence.