Date sent: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 11:53:19 -0400 From: "Mike N. Reinemann" Subject: FIVE GUYS, NINE ARMS NYPOST.COM Entertainment: FIVE GUYS, NINE ARMS By LINDA STASI FIVE GUYS, NINE ARMS By LINDA STASI July 18, 2001 -- "Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story" Tonight on VH1 at 9 WHEN the VH1 video tape of "Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story" landed on my desk last week, I got very nervous. Oh, dear God no! Why me? I feared being trapped watching another one of those awful "true-life" band movies, which are the modern day equivalent of the baseball biopics they used to make in the '50s - big, cleaned up versions of famous people's lives. So, my mood was not good as I approached "Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story." But I was wrong. The music is great, the acting's good, the storyline works, and aside from a script that cleans up the heavy metal band's act a little too much, the whole thing works. It's the story of the English working class rock band that started playing schools and ended up as a world-wide phenom, Def Leppard. This is the band whose drummer Rick Allen (Tat Whalley) drove his Corvette over an embankment when he was high and ended up as the world's only one-armed rock drummer. The movie moves along well until super model Amber Valletta as the Chanel-wearing model girlfriend of one of the bandmates shows up. She's so awful that whenever she speaks, it brings the whole scene to a dead halt. Really, she needs to stick to posing, for which she's a marvel of the modern world. Luckily, they cast Anthony Michael Hall as music producer Mutt Lange. He's so good he makes you forget that there's a clinker in the cast. The interesting thing about this movie, however, is that these kids who know they've got nowhere to go but the local factory, treat the band as their way out - and bring to rehearsing the same working class values their dads brought to the staple factory. It's like watching Behind The Music, but fake, so you don't see the wrenching later results of 20-odd years of drugs and booze. It's good to pretend that they all stayed gorgeous and never got false teeth, and suffered the worst fate that can befall a rocker: receding hairlines. NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COM are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2001 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.