Cinema File: The best band you've never heard of

My cousin, Pete, was the first head-banger I ever knew. My brother and I would visit our relatives in New York every summer, and with each passing year, Pete's guitar skills seemed to grow right along with the amount of metal band posters on his bedroom walls. That was the late 1980s, when bands like Poison and Metallica were on the radio, and their videos were being played constantly on MTV.

Pete was a couple of years older than me, and I remember thinking how cool it was that he was into all this wild music, and that he could play the guitar really fast and technically precise. But as I got older, the '90s happened and that sort of music became a joke, and our trips to New York became less frequent.

Every so often, my grandmother would bring back a tape of Pete's latest band for me to listen to, and it was as if he somehow was frozen in time. He was playing the exact same thing year after year, never changing, never losing passion for that style, no matter what changes occurred in popular music. And I never understood why until I discovered Anvil a few days ago.

The first 10 minutes of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" are so ridiculously perfect, they seem fake. In fact, when I first saw the trailer for the film, I took it to be a mockumentary like "This Is Spinal Tap."

A quick succession of recognizable figures from the world of rock 'n' roll and heavy metal appear at the film's opening, adding to the unbelievable quality of its setup. Members of Guns N' Roses, Motorhead, Slayer, Metallica and Anthrax speak of Canada's Anvil as this extremely influential, amazing band, but I sat there all the while thinking, I've never even heard of Anvil before.

Formed in the late '70s by high school pals Steve "Lips" Kudrow and Robb Reiner (not to be confused with "Spinal Tap" director Rob Reiner), the band exploded on the American metal scene just long enough to spend its 15 minutes making quite an impression on audiences and musicians alike, only to be completely passed over by the successes of pretty much every band who came after it. So what happened?

In what likely will go down in film history as one of the greatest rock