Rockumentaries can be pretentious, but not this one. The first thing you’ll discover in Andrew Horn’s documentary We are Twisted F***ing Sister is that the band members are great guys: hardworking, kind, mostly sober. They’re also good storytellers. Who among us wouldn’t be charmed to hear how Dee Snider discovered the perfect garish shade of red lipstick, or how guitarist Jay Jay French and the rest of the band politely asked Dee’s wife, Suzette, to make them stretchy girly glam costumes?
The film covers the band's early years when Twisted Sister worked a suburban bar circuit in Connecticut and New Jersey prior to their 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Arriving at 4:00 for a sound check, they’d later play their set – a grueling four hour long ordeal padded with audience interaction, shenanigans so rich with the cringe worthy they border on savagery – and then they’d repeat the schedule the next day, and the next, and the next. For over a decade they toiled. No wonder near the end they landed on the lyric “we’re not gonna take it.”
I didn’t know much about Twisted Sister prior to viewing Horn’s film, and yet I enjoyed it like I’d been a fan forever.