Movie Description by Jasunami:
Before the early days of MTV bands often released mini movies as promotional material to tease upcoming tours and album releases. Samson's "Biceps of Steel" is one such glimmering jewel of this sort of cheesy experimentation in primitive music video. Upon watching this accidentally hilarious spectacle I was left wondering if possibly Rob Reiner might have used this short film as one of the influences for the legendary "This is Spinal Tap" movie. But of course most cite the English Heavy Metal act "Saxon" as the model for Reiner's genius comedy.
Samson were part of the late '70s and early '80s new wave of British Heavy Metal that exported numerous great bands to the rest of the world. Of these there were bands such as Diamond Head, Tank, Motorhead and of course the legendary Iron Maiden. And speaking of Iron Maiden, "Biceps of Steel" shares a distant kinship with the band. How? Well, Samson was Bruce Dickinson's band. Bruce left Samson in the midst of its climb to the top of Heavy Metal recognition to replace Paul DiAno as lead singer of Iron Maiden.
Take note however that this film is by no means even remotely close to the creativity and power of Iron Maiden. Rather, the music of Samson is immature and somewhat spineless when compared side by side to the loudness and explosion of many bands which were oddly considered peers. Samson really only had one hit song if we can even entertain the notion of it being a hit or smash single. The track is entitled "Vice Versa" from the "Head Tactics" album and is an enjoyable number for the most part. This film is really nothing more than a build-up to this song which utilizes imagery of Delilah cutting the hair of the massively strong Samson biblical character. The only problem is that the Samson character in this film looks more like the lovechild of Carmine Appice and Frank Zappa being somewhat devoid of barbaric muscles as well.
There's a couple interesting side notes to the band Samson and this short film. For one,
the concert footage used in this film from a Samson concert at London's Rainbow Theater in 1980 was also used in the 1981 British horror film entitled "Incubus." (which I suggest all to see by the way.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0084133/ ) Also, Samson's drummer known as "Thunderstick" (Barry Graham) who also played in a very early stage of Iron Maiden before Clive Burr, had a stage gimmick of wearing S&M clothing and performing within the confines of a steel cage. The band had spun a legend of Thunderstick being a sexual predator and a danger to society. Hence the reason he performed within a cage to keep the audience safe. Well, this gimmick backfired on Thunderstick eventually when Scotland Yard brought him in under temporary arrest for questioning on a series of serial rapes in the greater London area. Apparently there was a serial rapist who was wearing leather S&M clothing during the commission of his crimes and people actually reported that he looked like Samson's Thunderstick. After a shot period of questioning and surveillance Thunderstick was released but soon after Samson was dissolved as a band.
Runtime: 15 minutes
File Format: AVI file (DVD rip)
Codecs: MPEG-4 Video / MP3 Audio
Encoder: XviD
Average Bitrate (kbps): 10000
2-Pass Encoding
Width: 624
Height: 480
Language: English (AC3) (2CH)
Sample Rate (Hz): 44100
Bitrate (kbps): 192
Torrent link:
Samson.-.Biceps.of.steel.1980.DivX.DVDRip-JASUNAMI
