Lust for Freedom, Fear No Evil, Grim Reaper, Beavis and Butt-head, Weezer, and the wolf-headed version of the Minotaur

OK, I have to confess that I’ve never seen this movie. But I’ve seen about one hundred other women-in-prison movies so I don’t think that really matters. Actually, maybe I have seen it–they’re so hard to tell apart that it wouldn’t surprise me.

Around the same era that I was watching women-in-prison movies, I was living in a large house with a bunch of guys. We were in college and poor. We had a radio with a cassette player in the kitchen, but only one of us still had any cassettes. All of them were metal. So I listened to a lot of metal while cooking and eating boxed mac-and-cheese and similar food-like substances.

I don’t remember most of it, other than some Stryper I was already familiar with and some late Blue Öyster Cult. The chief exception was Grim Reaper, who were so over-the-top in their sheer “scary” metal power that they couldn’t help but leave an impression. How do you forget songs with titles like “Night of the Vampire” and “Suck it and See”? How do you forget an album named Rock You to Hell?

Obviously, you don’t.

“Lust for Freedom,” from the Rock You to Hell album, is the theme song to the women’s prison movie of the same name.

While reasonably well known among American metalheads, Grim Reaper was only exposed to a substantially larger audience once. That was on “Beavis and Butt-head,” where Butt-head demanded that they “stop in the name of all that which does not suck.”

Apparently, Weezer edited the video for Grim Reaper’s “Fear No Evil” and used it for “We Are All on Drugs.” The official Universal Music video of the song isn’t that at all, and I can’t find the Grim Reaper version online (update: see below). That’s a real shame–lots of folks have seen the awesomeness of Dio’s “Holy Diver” video, but the “Fear No Evil” video is just as awesome but not as well known as the song wasn’t a hit.

You really have to see this. After all, how many videos are there out there where the band emancipates slaves and defeats the wolf-headed version of the Minotaur through the magic of rock? Two, I guess.

If anyone knows where I can see the Weezer video, please let me know.

Update: Hell, yeah, found it. (WMV format)