Metal Underground.com

The first thing I though when I saw the cover to this album is that, if the name of the band is, say, Superhorrorfuck, isn't putting a PMRC warning label on it a little extraneous?

Actually, the cover and title alone tell you just what you're going to get. It's a punked-up shock-rocker with glam rock influences and a more-than-morbid sense of humor. In terms of wit, it's hardly Alice Cooper — or even Rob Zombie, there are definitely some decent grooves here.

In fact, instrumentally, the band clicks well, with bassist "Mr. 4" and guitarists "Sgt. Anubis" and "Paghalloween" particularly standing out on tracks like the speedy "You Can Leave Your Head On" and the title track, "Livingdeadstar," which feels in parts like some kind of evil Poison track.

"Dr. Freak," the singer, is OK, but a little bit of his excessively "punk-growly" tones goes a long way. That said, if you're bigtime horror film fan, you're might to find his — and the rest of the band's — performance on tracks like "The Texas Chainsaw Ranger" and the bizarre "Holy Zombie" to your liking. For the rest of us, the joke may get more than a little old by about halfway through the album.

With all that hack-and-slash going on, it's somewhat surprising that the album's best track is "Hot N' Cold," a fairly faithful cover of a Katy Perry song. It's got a nice, poppy bounce, which drummer "Littlebomb" gives a welcome dose of rock heft to.

Still, it'd be pretty hard to say that the album delivers anything other than the gloomily goofy over-the-top splatter film imagery promised by the cover. If Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper taught us anything, it's that shock rock needs to have brains — other than the kind the zombies devour — to be effective. Unfortunately, Superhorrorfuck's "Livingdeadstars" is mostly lacking them.