*The following story contains spoilers for Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. *
Right now a lot of us are desperate for new movies and we're also pretty desperate to laugh, and so the new film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga which can be found on Netflix, might be perfect. It's Will Ferrell being ridiculous on screen, which is usually good for a laugh or two even if it doesn't hit exactly on the mark every time. But Ferrell isn't the only one to enjoy in the new movie as he stars alongside Rachel McAdams and the movie even includes the perfect cameo from singer Demi Lovato.
In the film, Demi Lovato plays Katiana Lindsdottir, an Icelandic singer who is major competition for the musical duo of Fire Saga, played by Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams. Lovato gets to sing in the movie, but apparently it wasn't that which got the performer on board the film. Instead, director David Dobkin tells USA Today that she loved a sequence later in the film where her character, after dying in a boat explosion, comes back as a charred corpse, a la An American Werewolf in London. According to the director...
The real question was whether she was going to get the joke of Katiana coming back and looking like hell. And she loved it. I actually checked in after they said yes and asked, 'Did she really read those scenes?' I even sent some internet photos of Griffin Dunne from American Wolf in London to be clear, like, this is what we're doing.
The sequence, which shows a scorched Demi Lovato, would certainly have been familiar to anybody familiar with the famous Griffin Dunne scene in An American Werewolf in London, but it wasn't simply that the two scenes had something in common, rather that the new Eurovision movie was specifically planning to ape the original scene. The director went as far as to send images of the scene to Demi Lovato just to be sure that she was on the same page. And yes, she was.
Demi Lovato must have loved the role because it required three hours of makeup to make look like she does in her scene at the end. That's a pretty serious commitment to the joke.
The Eurovision song contest is a massive event in Europe and while it has its fans in the U.S., it's still a largely obscure cultural institution. The film acts as a sort of crash course in Eurovision in its own way. Several former Eurovision performers appear in the film, and while certainly The Story of Fire Saga is a comedy, it has to be said that the actual song contest can get pretty silly itself, so not everything you see in the movie is quite as over the top as it might appear.
