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" Many films are rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, but only a select few are truly metal. With their shared affinity for all things devilish and gruesome, the horror genre and heavy metal have long been bedfellows, yet a closer look at the past thirty years&amp;#039; worth of badass cinema reveals that a movie need not be overtly satanic and spooky to earn its devil-horn credentials. Be it in concert documentaries, crime dramas, or juvenile comedies, heavy metal cinema blends a fondness for the occult and the otherworldly with an everything-to-the-extreme ethos that sets it apart from the pack. Here, we salute the 20 most metal movies ever. Mad Max: Fury Road  The Mad Max series has been thoroughly metal from the start, but in the fourth installment it&amp;#039;s hard to pick out a single element that isn&amp;#039;t just totally metal as hell, from the army of shirtless, corpse-painted warriors to the ceaseless barrage of explosions. The bad guys&amp;#039; rolling ensemble of war drummers fronted by a blind cenobite guitar shredder proves that in Max&amp;#039;s world, metal has easily outlived civilization. Conan the Barbarian      John Milius&amp;#039; adaptation of Robert E. Howard&amp;#039;s barbarian stories had just slightly less influence on heavy metal than Black Sabbath (the band, not the movie). Arnold Schwarzenegger&amp;#039;s bloodthirsty Nietzschean superman is like the personification of metal&amp;#039;s core ideals, and at this point just about every proper noun in the movie has been nicked by a metal band in need of a name. Faces of Death      The original fake found-footage horror movie, Faces of Death&amp;#039;s luridly low-budget gross-out effects inspired hundreds of inventively splatter-fied album covers, and is a primary influence on the dismemberment-themed subgenre called goregrind. The fact that it was sold as a real-deal snuff film only amped up its considerable shock value. Valhalla Rising      Just before he made Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn directed this dreamy psychedelic flick starring Mads Mikkelsen (of TV&amp;#039;s Hannibal) as a mute, heavily tattooed Norse warrior named One-Eye (for a reason) who disembowels a bunch of dudes, accidentally discovers America, has a bad experience with some psychoactive drugs, and then kills some more dudes. Legend has it that doom metal was actually invented by a Viking who was tripping his ass off on mushrooms. Lemmy      Like the wasted guy in the trailer says, without Lemmy there&amp;#039;s no Mot\u00F6rhead, no Metallica, no Megadeth, no Slayer, nothing. This documentary offers the most intimate portrait yet of the most metal dude to have ever lived. House of 1000 Corpses      Rob Zombie&amp;#039;s directorial debut has cannibalism, satanism, and a murderous clown named Dr. Satan, making it pretty much the cinematic equivalent of a Rob Zombie album. Anvil! The Story of Anvil      Canadian metal band Anvil&amp;#039;s been playing in one form or another since 1978, and the fact that you probably can&amp;#039;t name an Anvil song off the top of your head is a good indication of how successful their career&amp;#039;s been. Still, this documentary finds an inspiring message in the group&amp;#039;s refusal to ever give up on their dreams or capitulate to cold, boring common sense.  Lord of the Rings (1978)      The wickedly brutal Ringwraithes in Peter Jackson&amp;#039;s big-budget live-action adaptation of Tolkien&amp;#039;s swords-and-sorcery epic are respectably metal, but those movies lose all cred for the long stretches of nothing but Hollywood-pretty people talking to each other. The real deal is Ralph Bakshi&amp;#039;s cultishly beloved animated version, in which every shot looks like it belongs on the side of a van. Heavy Metal in Baghdad      To start a death metal band in Baghdad during the height of the Iraq War, you&amp;#039;d have to be insane, or at least devoted enough to metal to qualify as such. Filmed in 2006 amid a bloody outbreak of sectarian violence, this doc follows the group Acrassicauda as they try to do normal band stuff like practice and play shows while dodging American bombs and local religious militants.  Pantera: Vulgar Video/Cowboys from Hell       The members of Pantera liked to make themselves out to be a bunch of crazy rednecks who party harder and wilder than anyone else, and this pair of tour documentaries, heavy on backstage antics, prove that they weren&amp;#039;t exaggerating. Shot on &amp;#039;90s-era consumer-grade video cameras, they&amp;#039;re like watching home movies from a family made up exclusively of headbanging party animals. River&amp;#039;s Edge      A based-on-a-true-story 1986 drama about a group of teens (including Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, and Ione Skye) who keep quiet after learning that one of their friends has murdered a girl, River&amp;#039;s Edge has a sleazy grimness and morbidity that&amp;#039;s pure metal. The fact that the characters are also metal-loving delinquents helped further the then-fashionable impression (also fostered by court cases involving Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest) that such &amp;quot;devil music&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#039;t just loved by nihilists and deviants, but actually helped transform kids into them. Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years      While 2005&amp;#039;s Metal: A Headbanger&amp;#039;s Journey ably charts the rise of various modern subgenres (power metal, death metal, black metal, thrash metal), Penelope Spheeris&amp;#039;s 1988 documentary remains an even more fascinating account of &amp;#039;80s metal. In particular, it&amp;#039;s her portrait of the thriving hair metal scene in and around L.A.&amp;#039;s Sunset Boulevard that remains most memorable, highlighted by W.A.S.P.&amp;#039;s Chris Holmes getting sloshed (including pouring vodka over his head) while lounging in a pool at night alongside his mother \u2014 a sight that epitomizes the pitfalls of living the metal life to the fullest. Bill and Ted&amp;#039;s Excellent Adventure      A time-travel odyssey of supreme headbanging goofiness, Bill and Ted&amp;#039;s Excellent Adventure celebrated the dim-bulb spirit of metal via its air-guitaring California slacker protagonists Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter), and Ted &amp;quot;Theodore&amp;quot; Logan (Keanu Reeves). Their epic journey into the past may result in friendships with (among others) Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Socrates, but it&amp;#039;s their infectiously absurd love of all things rock that lands them on this list \u2014 and continues to make us pine for a Wyld Stallyns reunion tour. (Stick around for the even better sequel,Bill &amp;amp;amp; Ted&amp;#039;s Bogus Journey.)  Metallica: Some Kind of Monster      Through the Never isn&amp;#039;t Metallica&amp;#039;s first big-screen effort. They made their cinematic debut in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky&amp;#039;s 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster, which detailed the making of their album St. Anger. A portrait of a band in crisis, Berlinger and Sinofsky&amp;#039;s film captures Metallica at their dysfunctional apex, with substance abuse, internal strife, and the departure of longtime bassist Jason Newsted all threatening to destroy the group. It&amp;#039;s metal psychotherapy of a train-wreck sort, and all the more captivating when departed guitarist Dave Mustaine (later to find fame with Megadeth) shows up to confront his former Metallica mates about his ouster decades earlier.  Trick or Treat      This 1986 horror throwaway only features cameos from Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons, but then again, it features cameos from Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons. That fact alone would help the film make our cut. But Trick or Treat is metal all the way, from its story about a dead rocker who \u2014 after sending messages from the great beyond via a record played backwards \u2014 comes back to life, to its hilarious miscasting of Marc Price, aka Family Ties&amp;#039; nitwit Skippy, as the hero tasked with stopping the undead musician from carrying out his reign of terror. Wayne&amp;#039;s World      With its cable-access hosts Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) embodying the shredding-in-the-basement ridiculousness of so many metal aficionados, Wayne&amp;#039;s World both mocks and celebrates the axe-grinding, double bass-loving musical genre and its adherents. Directed by Decline of Western Civilization helmer Penelope Spheeris, the film is an inspired bit of long-form metal-esque mirth, right down to its signature set piece of Wayne, Garth, and company doing a righteous car sing-along to Queen&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Bohemian Rhapsody.&amp;quot;  Heavy Metal      While satanic imagery and bloodshed are frequent elements of metal, so too are fantastical mythological beasts, sci-fi craziness, and scantily clad valkyrie babes, as evidenced by 1981&amp;#039;s seminal animated anthology Heavy Metal. Adapted from tales found in the magazine of the same name, and rife with gratuitous nudity and violence, it&amp;#039;s a psychedelic movie for headbanging stoners young and old, replete with a soundtrack featuring (among others) Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Blue \u00D6yster Cult, and a pre-Van Halen Sammy Hagar.  Heavy Metal Parking Lot      A VHS bootleg sensation in the early &amp;#039;80s, Heavy Metal Parking Lot delivers exactly what its title promises \u2014 fans in a parking lot outside Maryland&amp;#039;s Capital Centre, tailgaiting before a Judas Priest concert. A 17-minute tribute to the numb-skulled trashy ludicrousness of the genre&amp;#039;s long-haired die-hards, this underground cult classic (see above, in its entirety) has since been released on DVD with hours of equally absurd bonus footage. Cannibal Holocaust      Ruggero Deodato&amp;#039;s notorious 1980 exploitation shocker is the ne plus ultra of heavy metal horror efforts. A cheap, tawdry, and grisly affair, it&amp;#039;s a controversy-courting kindred spirit to dismemberment-and-death-obsessed death metal, especially in its disgustingly drawn out depiction of actual animal slaughter, which is as nasty as it is childishly sensationalistic.  This Is Spinal Tap      All of heavy metal is satirized, with equal measures of love and loopiness, in one iconic bit that&amp;#039;s dialed to eleven. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a27472/heavy-metal-movies/>