We Are Twisted F***ing Sister! Exhaustively Traces Glitter-Metal Band’s Workmanlike Ascent

If one sign of a great music documentary is to sway people who are apathetic toward the subject to care about it, then Andrew Horn’s We Are Twisted F***ing Sister! probably fails. But at least it’s long (136 f***ing minutes). In overly thorough detail, Horn traces Twisted Sister’s struggle from mediocre glitter-rock group to their rise to the summit of the New York City-area club/casino scene in the 1970s to multi-platinum heavy-metal muthas who earned Lemmy’s respect in the 1980s.

Singer Dee Snider and guitarist Jay Jay French dominate the many talking-head scenes, which are interspersed with much live concert footage—just like every other music doc you’ve seen. Band members come and go with some frequency, but Twisted Sister’s propensity for gaudy women’s clothing, makeup, and profane stage banter coupled with bombastic, banal anthems gains them the adoration of millions of dim-witted partyers.

While the film makes you grudgingly admire the band’s Herculean grind, it also informs you that they fostered significant, noxious anti-disco sentiments in their fan base—a lunkheaded stratagem they ran with because fools loved it. Twisted Sister wanted so badly to “make it,” they didn’t much care if the process fomented hostility toward people who weathered an unfair amount of it during disco’s heyday.