I’ve just been striking out with a vengeance on my recent Netflix picks for drum reviews and  this is strike 3… good thing I’m not playing baseball. Mike Terrana’s Rhythm Beast is very similar to Ian Paice’s DVD that I reviewed previously in that there was some confusion as to what I was getting into when I read the description. The description led me to believe that this was a performance/instruction just like the description of Ian Paice’s DVD led me to believe it was a regular instructional. I was wrong then and I’m wrong again this time.

     This DVD is a straight up performance DVD. It’s just Mike playing to a bunch of tracks in a studio with no one else around. That’s it. I’m actually kinda insulted because when I looked at the menu of the DVD I was kinda looking forward to it. The main menu has three options; instruct me, entertain me, and chapters. I thought the entertain me and instruct me options were funny and ever so slightly brightened my day when I saw them (yeah… I’m pretty easy to please) so I hit entertain me. Mike Terrana pops up and says, “so in closing I hope you enjoyed this DVD as much as I enjoyed making it.” Wait! What!? In closing?! I just popped in the DVD! After Mike finished his little talk about how nice of us it was to “enjoy” his product, you get treated to footage of him playing a bunch of different songs one after another. The music he plays along to is some sort of  lite prog-rock/metal/fusion stuff. Imagine, Dream Theater + Vital Information – about 80% of the awesome that either of those two bring to the table = this mess.

     Ok so that was pretty bad but what about the instruct me part? Maybe I’m supposed to watch that first and I just got it all backwards! Nope. It’s the exact same stuff but you have a split screen thing going on so you can see his feet at the same time while he plays through the tracks. I suppose the idea is that you can watch all his movements and deduce how to play the songs for yourself… why you would want to do that is beyond me though.

Then you have the chapter’s section which just like any other chapter selection menu. You can select which song you want to see Mike play.

No matter how you spin this DVD it’s the same eight song performances over and over again. With one option they will play most of them back to back, with another you get a bass-drum view and the third is you just get to see one song of your choosing.

Once again this isn’t an instructional so I’m not going to bother giving it a mic score…

I’m just going to say this. Don’t buy or rent this DVD… that will only send the message that it’s ok to put out crap like this and it’s not. This is something that would be awesome if it came free with an album or at the bottom of a box of cereal or something like that but on its own it’s just pathetic.