It seems like only yesterday that Tawny Kitaen was slinking atop a Jaguar in lingerie for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” music video. The song was a mega hit back in 1987 on this day, and few can forget the metal rockers’ ridiculous music video featuring the Bachelor Party actress.
There’s just something hilarious about the combination of big hair, shredding guitars, and absurdly aggressive clichés in metal music video history that we can’t get enough of. Here are some of the funnier, bad-taste clips from metal bands that go to the extreme.
Dokken’s “Dream Warriors” was the terrible theme of the 1987 horror threequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, written by Wes Craven. Most of the video features the film’s star Patricia Arquette running around a spooky house evading pizza-faced child killer Freddy Krueger. The band confronts Freddy at the end of the song by sing-shouting into his face, resulting in a cheesy dramatic moment.
Messiah Marcolin, the former vocalist of Swedish doom band Candlemass, pulls out all the stops for the group’s “Bewitched” video. The snarling, wild-eyed singer, with his signature afro, creeps around a cemetery in a spooky black robe. Eventually, a gaggle of head-banging metalheads march him straight into a coffin. The whole ordeal looks like it was shot on someone’s cruddy camcorder (this was 1987), which gives it a certain homegrown appeal — but we can’t keep a straight face.
Nothing is more metal than your band’s depressed fiddle player busting out of an outhouse and doing this thing. Finnish folksters Korpiklaani bring the party.
Judas Priest works out on their Nordictrack, then performs “Hot Rockin'” while spontaneously erupting in fire. Rob Halford screams into a flaming microphone.
The legendarily bad music video for Norwegian black metal band Immortal’s “The Call of the Wintermoon” is loaded with metal stereotypes. Grumpy Cat-style corpse paint, pointy witch hats, capes, and castles are just the beginning of this hot mess.
Sometimes body-building champ Jon Mikl Thor, of the Canadian metal band Thor, gives us his best He-Man impression — but with more eyeliner and bad special effects.
Influential thrash metal band Venom definitely gives us nightmares. Even the video’s absurd use of fog and neon lights can’t conceal the terror of lead singer Cronos’ bug-eyed mug.
Italian group Rhapsody created glitch art (or something) before glitch art with their over-the-top video for “Power of the Dragonflame.” This thing features special effects we didn’t even know existed — most of them stuffed into the first 30 seconds of the clip.
Czech black metal band Master’s Hammer basically threw their hands up in the air and gave us the Satanic ritual stuff without any pretenses. This was filmed in the 1980s, after all.
No disrespect to everyone’s favorite metal god Dio, but we’re required to place any video with an excessive use of swords and burned-out churches on this list.