An album where I fear to tread. Where I chop and change on whether it’s good or not.

I will say this: it feels like an accomplishment that I enjoy Helloween’s 2005 two-CD opus as much as I do, because the band seemingly did not want me to. It puts many barriers between the music and the listener. Such as the first thing you notice about it: its title.

Yes, this is Helloween’s *Bat out of Hell 3*. Helloween’s *Operation Mindcrime 2.* One of *those* albums. The band, a solid 18 years removed from their classic *Keeper* golden years (and missing three out of the five musicians that made those years possible), is trying to *title* their way to a comeback. Ew. Gross.

They swing hard at the idea, sparing no expense. On a technical level, this is the best Helloween album ever made. Witness the greatest production work of Charlie Bauerfeind’s career—everything loud and punchy and precise, treble stropped sharp, bass pelagic-deep, no trace of mud or fizz anywhere. There’s an attentiveness to sonic equality—to getting all the players and registers on the same page—that’s very unusual, but effectively realized. Even Grosskopf’s basslines bounce out at you so clearly that a sharp-eared bassist could probably tab out all thirteen tracks on their second listen. The album’s sonics are rich and lush and verge on overvoluptuous, but it thrills with its decadence. It feels like all the instruments had breast implants and buccal fat removal surgery, if that makes sense.

And the musicians themselves are on fire (not literally—as *Mythbusters* confirmed, power metal musicians are non-flammable). The first stable lineup Helloween had in years (Deris/Weikath/Gerstner/Grosskopf/Loble) simply clicks in a way *Rabbit Don’t Come Easy*‘s transitional roster couldn’t—in particular, new drummer Dani Loble proves to be an astonishing discovery, finding little grooves and fills everywhere in the music and pounding them into your skull. After Uli Kusch, he’s my second favorite drummer to ever play in this band (with apologies to Ingo, who was fast and aggressive for 1985 but a little simplistic by modern standards).

The album sounds like a million deutschmarks. No complaints there.

But…it’s simply not as good as *Keeper of the Seven Keys* part *I* and *II*. Yes, that’s true of most albums, and I don’t normally draw the comparison. But when you call your album *Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy*, you’re shoving the barrel of that particular shotgun into your mouth and making duck noises.

Why do it? Why attempt the impossible—releasing a third (technically third and fourth, considering the 2nd disk) *Keeper* album, after nearly two decades? The 80s Helloween albums are truly special. And they relied on the soaring vocals of Michael Kiske and the brilliant songwriting of Kai Hansen, neither of whom are in the room.  The energy roused by a bunch of eighteen year olds from Hamburg cannot be summoned at will by forty year old men, only two of whom were in the band when it was active.

Worse, the songs are alarmingly spotty. Weak, knock-kneed, and confused. We get Michael Weikath’s foray into KISS style cock-rock with “Get it Up”, Andi Deris’s emptyheaded rewrite of “Dr Stein” entitled “Mrs God”, and uninteresting album filler like Weikath’s “Do You Know What You Are Fighting For” and Gerstner’s “The Invisible Man” that I have to actively fight not to skip over.

And don’t get me started on the “epic” that begins each disc. Both are so bloated you could swing a battleaxe through their skinniest part and not hit bone.

In general, the album is strongest as a glittery modern Nuclear Blast style power metal album, similar to the Finnish bands popular at the time (Sonata Arctica, Celesty, Dreamtale, and such). It is weakest when viewed as a continuation of classic Helloween. It is the latter comparison that the band forces you to make, over and over. Honestly, I dislike the whole idea of ever returning to Keeper. It’s not like this is some fascinating, rich fantasy concept. The whole thing’s at worst (or best?) meaningless, and at best (or worst?) a Stryper-lite fantasy parable about Christianity, as written by teenaged German boys who knew many words, and even a couple that were in English.

There are some bits and pieces of classic Helloween, but it’s done in a careless mocking way that smacks of persiflage. Sascha Gerstner’s “Silent Rain” has a chorus melody nearly identical to “Eagle Fly Free”, but the lyrics are about child molestation. Why do that? This is meant as a joke? “You know what sucks about ‘Eagle Fly Free’? No child molestation” is a thought I cannot imagine anyone ever having.

The songs hit double-digit numbers of minutes (for the first time since 1988), but don’t do much good with it. “King of a Thousand Years” is boring. “Occasion Avenue” opens with a recap of classic Helloween songs, cementing the feeling that Helloween is trying to bully their way unearned into classic stature (“Forget that stuff, here’s the real deal!”). And although the song has a catchy chorus and some interesting parts, it doesn’t earn its length. The goal seems to have been to write a very, very long song, like classic Helloween, filling the empty space with whatever will fill it.

Andi Deris is an overwhelming presence, writing easily 80% of the material. He gives us album highlights “Come Alive”, and “The Shade in the Shadow”—poppy modern power metal songs that don’t sound like anything on either real *Keeper* LP but are of high quality—and “Occasion Avenue” is worth venturing down, through you could skip over about 6 minutes in the middle. He’s also behind “Mrs God”, and the lifeless ballad “Light the Universe”. Michael Weikath is the most active point of contact with 80s Helloween (Grosskopf was also in the band then, but he didn’t write songs until the 90s), but he contributes a generic fast song “Born on Judgment Day” that could have been written by anyone. His other two songs (“Do You Know What You Are Fighting For” and “Get It Up”) are the worst things the album has to offer.

*Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy* direly wants to be more than it is. It’s trying to bully its way into classic status, in a way that’s undignified. Like trying to offer St Peter a blowjob to get into heaven. Does that work? Has anyone tried it? The Bible says the sheep will be separated from the goats. Does that include throat goats?

Imagine if David Gilmour reformed “Pink Floyd” with a mixture of new musicians and AI and released *The Even Darker Side of the Moon*. Would you take it seriously? Of course not. It would be ludicrous. But it would probably sell copies, wouldn’t it?

*Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Beggacy* has been tried before, and will be tried again, over and over, long after modern life has Fedex-mailed us all into our coffins. Sometimes these sorts of forced comebacks happen at a label’s behest, but other times it’s the band themselves, because they sense something dark in the world’s elaborately turning gears. They sense that they do not matter. That music does not matter. What matters is the *brand*. The brand is the valuable thing that must be fought for. That’s why we get farcical situations—multiple competing versions of RATT and Queensryche and LA Guns roaming the land, suing each other for copyright infringement. You know why they call them brands? Because they used to put them on cattle.

Long ago, on *Keeper of the Seven Keys I* Kai Hansen wrote “Future World”. It opened with a fussy but charming little pentatonic melody, notes staccato palm-muted. It sounded like a man trying to pick a lock. “We all live in happiness! / our life is full of joy! / We say the word “tomorrow” without fear!” Yeah, there was irony to it—it’s like a recruitment anthem for a cult—but I always responded to the song’s reaching, defiant optimism.

In 2005, that optimism seemed so far away. Very hard to summon (or even remember). We’d seen the truth staring like a skull: there is no Future World. There isn’t even a Present World. There’s only a Past World, to be returned to again and again, a well brimming with nostalgic memories in a dry and arid desert. The past is our one source of meaning. There can never be anything new. Just pastiches of the old. Just *Keeper of the Seven Keys Part 3* and *The Simpsons season 34* and skeletonized boomers strumming guitars and bringing back ghosts, even though they seem halfway there themselves. Maybe when you sleep in the desert of Now, you dream of wide and blue oceans, echoing the face of the sky into the deep horizon. But it’s not real. Just stick to the well—even though less and less water comes up with every pull, even though it’s dark with pollution, it’s what we have and it’s all we have. Don’t leave the well. There’s nowhere else.

Smart and sharp. Fans of shit will want to miss this one, for it is emphatically not shit. Few films draw together such broad influences or mix them so confidently. Neo-western, plus Hitchcock, plus genre UFO flick, plus highbrow Baudrillardian meditation on filmic imagery, plus 90s monster anime, plus what else ya got in the fridge?

Many missed the movie’s theme, which seems straightforward to me.

Nope is about mankind’s desire to control wild things via language, to recontextualize the world of dripping teeth and claws into something safe, something human, something we can control and exploit.

This is illustrated in the movie several times. OJ’s horses are harmless entertainment…until they’re not. Gordy is a funny wacky sitcom monkey (clearly inspired by 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo)…until he’s not. These are wild animals. The metaphors humanity has recast them in are shallow and easily broken. Savage ancient eyes swivel wildly inside the smiling-face masks. We live around things can kill us. The usual solution (shutting our eyes and wishfully imagining that there aren’t also teeth inside the masks) can turn abruptly fatal.

The film is replete with references to extremely early pre-Hollywood cinema. Another one I thought of is 1903’s Electrocuting an Elephant, which documents the death of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant that (lazily quoting Wikipedia) had “killed a drunken spectator the previous year who burnt the tip of her trunk with a lit cigar”. What was going through that man’s head? Maybe he thought he was safe. After all, he’d paid for a ticket. Surely the elephant wouldn’t dare harm a paying customer of the circus.

The deadliest animal in the film is Jupiter, who kicks off everything with his amusement park wheeze (or so it’s implied). But note that he could have justified his actions. He had everything under control, bro! Trust me, bro! Nothing had ever gone wrong before, bro! And don’t you work with animals too, bro? That, again, is applying human logic to an alien world. A wild animal has not signed a contract and it is not bound by any natural law to perform as you expect. A cat will merrily play with you. Then a chance hand movement triggers a sparking cascade of neurons, thousands of years of domesticity crash like invalid code, and it lashes out. In that impulsive moment, it wants to destroy you. It’s only cute because a cat is too small to kill. If it was the size of a tiger, your guts would be outside your body. Nobody who ever picked up a snake thought they would get bitten by it.

A few years ago, I noticed people treating their pets as if they were human. Women would call their dogs “fur babies”. They’d talk to their dog in a coochie-coo baby language, as though their dog was a human infant. And when their pitbull mix attacked someone, they’d react with shock. That’s not how they raised their little guy to behave! Imagining a human face on a strange and alien thing comforts us, and affords us an illusion of control. But wildness still lives underneath, and can bite through that illusion as suddenly and finally as it can bite through you.

Always described in terms like “absurdist nonsense”, Holy Grail is far from nonsensical or absurd. It depicts a rigorous and orderly world. Its has bones of laws and tendons of logic. Yes, the rules it works by often strange and always arbitrary, but the characters are still forced to follow them, even when the rules are abruptly changed, subverted, or exposed as hollow and meaningless.

It’s a funny but sinister movie: characters are trapped in predefined roles and although they show some awareness of their artificial world, it’s a world they can never escape. Arthur, Lancelot, etc are checker pieces in a game that abruptly changes to chess, to parcheesi, to Mahjongg, to Starcraft II. It’s almost as much a dystopian satire as Brazil.

If the movie has a point, it’s this: “the rules we’re made to follow are all-important…until suddenly they don’t exist.” That’s an important idea in much of the Pythons’ work, and here it is the motor of the story. This dyadic structure (rule -> subversion) occurs again and again, almost too many times to count.

The Peasant. King Arthur justifies his reign with a speech about the Lady of the Lake giving him a magic sword. This is punctured by a peasant’s paraphrased observation “…but isn’t that a really stupid way to elect a leader?” King Arthur can’t answer (beyond saying “shut up!”) because the peasant’s obviously right. It is.

The Black Knight. He blocks King Arthur’s path, and ignores a royal order to step aside. Yes, Arthur fights and defeats him, yet in a weird way, this disempowers him as king. He has no authority over the Black Knight, beyond the strength of his sword arm (what would he have done if he was someone who couldn’t fight well, like a dwarf or an old man?). A king shouldn’t have to fight pointless macho duels against random subjects on the road. If he’s reduced to that, his kingship is either false or meaningless.

The Knights of Ni. Arthur goes on a long, frustrating quest to find a shrubbery, only to return and find that the people he was dealing with have disbanded, reformed under a new name, and have no intent of honoring their deal. His quest is rendered useless by bureaucracy, flipping from all important to futile.

The French. French soldiers occupy a castle on British land, and taunt Arthur for his inability to dislodge them. This further deflates his stature, because (as with the Black Knight), his kingship gives him no actual authority. People can insult, mock, or defy him, and he has little recourse except to insult them back or clumsily try to fight them—tactics of commoners, not kings. This scene has happened many times through history. Foreign colonizers arrive, establish an outpost or a trading colony, and because of a technological advantage like cannons or horses, the regional power can’t do anything. This triggers a regional power shift: the subjects learn that their king’s power was illusory. He wasn’t chosen by God, and wasn’t the last in the line of serpent people. He owned the land because he was able to defend it, and once someone with brass cannons came along, he was no longer able to defend it and didn’t own diddly-squat.

The Legendary Beast. At Castle Aarrgh, the knights are chased into a corner by a horrible monster. Things look grim…until the animator drawing the monster dies, and the monster turns into a harmless drawing (which, of course, it always was)

The Bridgekeeper’s Riddles. Knights try to cross a bridge, but are blocked by a bridgekeeper who asks unfair riddles. Several knights fail and are flung to their deaths. But then Arthur lawyers the scenario’s rules against the Bridgekeeper, gets HIM tossed into the pit, and the remaining knights cross with no further problems. This is a rare example of a character actually manipulating the logic of their world in a positive direction (although Arthur seems to have done so by accident).

So that’s the film. “The rules matter…until they don’t.”

If the Pythons have a point, it’s this: most of society’s instructions are arbitrary, and can be ignored. We could all collectively believe Britain is part of France, and it would become part of France. Often, the future belongs to the powerful and clever and mad, because they have the “hacker mindset”—they can stare past something’s surface illusion and discover its underlying interface. You can try to speedrun a game by playing it “properly” (the way the developers intended). But someone else has found a way to glitch through a wall and has already set the Any% WR.

Yes, the average Joe has to follow rules—people with big sticks tend to whack you if you don’t—but you’re a sucker if you actually believe in them. They aren’t real. They are largely made up by people who want to control you. Do not love the law: it does not love you back. Those who wave a rulebook and say “no fair! A dog can’t play baseball!” are fated to watch a dog dunk on them, over and over, forever.

I do not regard this as a nihilistic AJ Soprano film about how nothing matters. Just that our sense of the world’s shape (and of things like morality and ethics) is a judgment we should make ourselves, rather than accepting someone else’s. Viewed this way, it’s strangely ennobling. All chains are glass. We can imagine the world into new shapes.

I saw this as a kid. It enchanted me as few movies have done. I could not predict where it was going. And this gave the story, despite its surface silliness, a deep underlying realism.

At six years of age, I was noticing already that certain things always happened in movies: the good person always won, the bad person always lost, side characters often died, main characters never did, and so on. Next to these obvious commercial formulas, Holy Grail was scary. Unpredictable. It seemed ruthless and mad, the way characters just horribly died, the way the quest just seemed doomed to fail. It was like a snake in my mind for a long time. Forget the surrealist parts. For the first time, I had seen the world I lived in depicted in a movie.