Rock Icon Paul Stanley's Five Favorite Films

Great movie. It was one of the first films, I thought, that really took comedy to an absurd level. Whether it was watching Bill Murray’s hair that was a comb-over, [or when he] keeps falling over when he’s in a competition, or Woody Harrelson had a great scene where he’s playing an Amish guy and he comes in and says he spent the day milking the cows. He has this big pail, and he takes a drink and they go, “They’re bulls [laughing]!”

You know what? For me, life has enough bad news in it. So for me it’s either make me laugh or blow s— up.

RT: That’s your philosophy onstage too.

It’s my philosophy about life. There’s enough bad news. It’s very interesting because I remember I used to hang out with a lot of actors in the early 1980s because I thought that musicians were, for the most part, boneheads and had very little to talk about. So I figured, “Let me hang out with some actors, it should be interesting.” I found out – and I found this from spending a lot of time with them – most of them will tolerate listening to you talk just so they get their turn. So anyway, I remember spending an evening – I used to spend time with Christopher Reeve and a lot of really great New York based people. And I was saying how much I loved one of the Rambo movies, and he was kind of like wincing and really not sharing my view and he wound up as Superman. And Peter Weller was there a lot, and Peter winds up being Robocop. But for me it really comes down to — I went out with an actress at one point and we went to some foreign film and when it ended I went, “That’s it?” She goes, “Yeah, it’s a slice of life.” I go, “I don’t need to sit and watch a slice of life. I live life. Entertain me!” I’m not interested in some guy who has an affair and smokes cigarettes in a foreign movie so, for me, it really is make me laugh or blow s— up and do it well. So, Something About Mary, Kingpin…

I thought Trainwreck was great. I’m always surprised when a film makes me laugh out loud, and that’s such a wonderful, cathartic… I thought John Cena was hysterical in that.

Curse of the Werewolf, Oliver Reed. Hammer Films. Hammer did all these fabulous horror films after Unviversal. Hammer really became the guardian of the horror genre and between Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Oliver Reed also, they did so many remakes and Curse of the Werewolf was terrific. There was a voluptuous vixen who winds up being thrown into a cell and getting banged by some questionable beast.

RT: Another slice of life, perhaps?

Yes! Yeah! And she gives birth to who becomes the werewolf. Curse of the Werewolf just because it’s a different genre.

RT: We know Gene is huge into horror. KISS is sometimes representative of the genre; are you into horror films also?

Well, we’re cinematic. I think what KISS did was take the normal screen to IMAX. We just opened it up and made the scope of it that much bigger and larger than life. But horror films per se, I enjoyed them when I was younger and enjoyed seeing Bela Lugosi play the Frankenstein Monster versus Lon Chaney, Jr. playing it or Glenn Strange or Boris Karloff. So, yes, I appreciated the movies, but at this point it’s more a nostalgia thing; I don’t really have a connection. Or the original King Kong. Or The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad. There’s a great film, Women in Love. That was a British film. It was Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, an adaptation [of the D.H. Lawrence book].

There are loads of films that I’ve enjoyed. Zorba the Greek. Great! I like feel-good films. In Zorba the Greek you have this way of bringing these logs up a mountain – I don’t remember much – but the whole thing falls apart and it’s this huge catastrophe in the end and Zorba winds up dancing. It’s like, there’s nothing – what do you do? You dance!