By Barry Divola

The fans know the drill. If you’re standing anywhere in the front half of the crowd at a Gwar concert, you will most definitely be sprayed with fake blood and other questionable fluids, which will be gushing like geysers out of severed limbs, heads and possibly an ejaculating cuttlefish codpiece.

If you want to believe the Gwar mythology, the band is a group of barbaric intergalactic warriors who were banished from their home planet and came to Earth, where they started the human race and then watched them try to destroy the planet and each other. These beings, with names like Jizmak Da Gusha and Pustulus Maximus, look like the offspring of characters from Masters Of The Universe and the cantina scene in Star Wars, conceived during a particularly bad acid trip.

Cult horror-punk band Gwar are the subject of the heartfelt new documentary, This Is Gwar.Credit:Jeremy Saffer

If you want to know the intriguing true story of the men underneath the grotesque costumes, then check out the new documentary This Is Gwar.

The film traces the group’s genesis to the 1980s in Richmond, Virginia. The former capital of the confederacy during the Civil War had become a crime-ridden shell of a city by then, but the many vacant buildings downtown provided cheap digs for the art students who attended VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University). At an abandoned dairy bottling plant, the future members of Gwar lived and worked on their various projects.

“Gwar was always about valorising the low and attacking the high,” says Mike Bishop, who plays Blothar The Berserker, Gwar’s lead singer. “When the group formed it was reacting against the notions of institutionalised art we were getting at art school. Gwar was saying, ‘Wait a minute, we love comic books, we love professional wrestling, we love horror movies, we love Japanese animation, we love science fiction, we love Dungeons & Dragons.’ We thought all these things were valuable and important.”

Bishop, 53, is a bear of a man with a flowing grey beard. He has a PhD in music and formerly taught popular music ethnology and performance studies at UVA (University of Virginia). As Blothar, he is a towering figure who looks like a Mutant Ninja Turtle gone bad, with giant elk horns sprouting from his shoulders and a large shield he uses as a weapon.

Festival goers get splattered with fake blood at a typical Gwar performance in Louisville, Kentucky.Credit:Invision/AP

Bishop was not always Gwar’s frontman. He played bass for two stints between the late ’80s and late ’90s under the name Beefcake The Mighty. The original singer and co-founder of the group was Dave Brockie, a hyperactive, arty punk rocker who took on the name Oderus Urungus.

Brockie comes across as the charismatic leader and spokesperson in the documentary, especially when the group ventured into the mainstream in the first half of the ’90s. They featured in the movies Mystery Date and Empire Records. Beavis & Butthead were, unsurprisingly, huge fans, and the aim of their 1994 video game was to get into a Gwar concert.

They were even interviewed on TV talk shows. The film features footage of their appearance on The Joan Rivers Show, where Rivers and Brockie exchange banter like they’re in a screwball comedy. Rivers tries to get serious when she says, “It worries me that someone somewhere is going to watch you guys and say, ‘Okay, that’s what we’ll do.’”

Brockie doesn’t miss a beat, replying, “Well, let them join the army or something. There’s plenty of outlets for that.”

But it’s easy to see why Gwar, which the film’s tagline christens “the sickest band in the world”, invoked the wrath of conservatives.

Over the years, a trademark of the live show has been the mutilation and beheading of effigies of celebrities, politicians and public figures, including O.J. Simpson, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton and the Pope. They have killed facsimiles of every US president since Ronald Reagan and believe in equal opportunity – whether the POTUS is a Republican or a Democrat, they will lose their head and gush fake blood into the audience. When they toured Australia in 2014, they even paraded a lookalike of then-PM Tony Abbott on stage, before he, too, was relieved of his imitation head with an imitation sword.

Bishop sees all this as part of the Gwar ethos.

“I think we mount a critique of modern life and we do it with comedy and horror and music and attitude,” he says. “It’s very transgressive but it winds up being an inclusive experience for the audience. It’s obscene, but it’s also kind of welcoming. Yes, we’re taking the piss out of people, but we’re doing it in a fun way and pointing out the absurdity of life.”

Mike Derks, who has been the group’s rhythm guitarist since 1988 under the stage name Balsac The Jaws Of Death, a character that wears a horned helmet that looks like a bear trap, says “Gwar’s biggest enemy has always been authority. And what bigger symbol of authority is there in the United States than the President? So, no matter who’s in office, Gwar is going to kill them on stage. As for the criticism we get, it’s like when people criticised Roadrunner cartoons because they were worried kids would drop anvils on people. You can see the humour in Gwar and you can look deeper and see we’re trying to comment on certain things.”

“We mount a critique of modern life and we do it with comedy and horror and music and attitude.”Credit:Shudder

The film doesn’t shy away from the group’s problems, from internal power struggles and bad blood between founding members, to the death on the tour bus of lead guitarist Cory Smoot (Flattus Maximus) in 2011 at the age of 34 from a coronary artery thrombosis, and the death from heroin overdose of Dave Brockie in 2014 at the age of 50.

In This Is Gwar, some of the members choke up and are reduced to tears when they talk about these events. It turns out there’s a lot they haven’t processed.

“We’re horrible communicators and not great with our feelings,” admits Derks. “Even to this day we haven’t really talked about these things with each other, even though we talked about it on film. We don’t sit on the tour bus together and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about that night Dave died.’ It’s just too hard. When Cory died, we played the very next night and no one said anything. But on stage, that was our way to work through it, performing and being with each other.”

Living in a country whose Supreme Court just overturned the right for a woman to have a legal abortion, and where mass shootings are becoming a terrifyingly regular occurrence, Bishop says that “over time it’s become difficult for Gwar to keep up with man’s inhumanity.”

Derks adds: “The more f—ed-up things get, the more people need a band like Gwar. It’s like turning a mirror on all the horrible stuff that’s going on. We’re just a bunch of artists and musicians, so we’re not going to come up with the answers to the world’s problems, but we can certainly point them out and poke fun at them.”

Many of the members of Gwar are entering their mid-fifties. They perform in bulky stage costumes that weigh over 30kg, playing instruments and singing while also doing wrestling moves and staging choreographed fights. They’re aware that as they push towards 60, they have a use-by date – but that doesn’t mean Gwar will die.

“We’ve always said that Gwar can keep going without us,” says Derks, who is 54, and on the day of our interview had just returned from the hospital to meet his newborn grandson. “It’s a lot easier for Mick Jagger to do a Rolling Stones show at 90, or however old he is now, than it would be for me to put on the Balsac costume when I’m 65.

“Gwar is ultimately about the monsters, not the people who are in the monster costumes. When I’m not physically able to perform anymore, I’ll pass it on to someone else. I want Gwar to continue.”

This Is Gwar is now streaming exclusively on Shudder.

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