Editor’s Note: Welcome to V3 Weekend, Vanyaland‘s guide to help you sort out your weekend entertainment with curated selections and recommendations across our three pillars of Music, Comedy, and Film/TV. It’s what you should know about, where you need to be, and where you’ll be going, with us riding shotgun along the way.
Music: Dangerous Toys at The Met
Hard n’ heavy rock n’ roll is having a moment. From Pussycat to Pearcy, bands of the retroactively rebranded “hair metal” scene are once again packing the clubs, offering nothin’ but a good time and a wealth of boozy bangers that sound as intoxicating as they did back in ’89. Next up to pull through New England are the mighty Dangerous Toys, Jason McMaster’s sleazy dynamo of Texas outlaws that delivered a bounty of dirt-dragged, sexed-up, and riff-heavy rippers that hold up nicely a few decades later (especially now that no one’s trying to lazily compare them to a certain Sunset Strip band of the era). When the Toys hit The Met in Pawtucket on Saturday night, gritty hard rock classics like adulterous anthem “Teas’n Pleas’n” and the soaring “Scared” should sound as potent as they did in the days when we all stayed up late to catch Headbangers Ball. And hey, let’s be real: Mountain-shaking debut album non-single “Queen of the Nile” is one of the absolute greatest songs of the genre, and we’ll take a hammer to anyone who declares otherwise. Feel that?
DANGEROUS TOYS + ALL SINNERS (RECORD RELEASE) + PINK :: Saturday, November 15 at The Met, 1005 Main St. in Pawtucket, RI :: 7 p.m., all ages, $40 in advance and $45 day of show :: Event info :: Advance tickets
Comedy: Iliza Shlesinger at The Chevalier
And now, once again, a word from Mic’d Up: Any year in which we get a new special from Iliza Shlesinger is a year in which we are better off. Now, as we start to see the closing frames 2025 in clear view, the powerhouse herself is returning to the area to bring the heat in person, and put some extra punctuation on a very successful year. With a one-two weekend punch of shows planned for Medford’s Chevalier Theatre starting on Friday (November 14), the global comedy star and Emerson alum makes her way back to the city as part of her Iliza! Live tour, which has brought her overseas, as well as all over North America for the better part of the last three months. Before announcing what will evidently be her “last tour for awhile,” Shlesinger added to her illustrious catalog of successful specials with A Different Animal, which landed on Amazon Prime Video back in March. While it may be tough, and even depressing, to think about a time where Shlesinger won’t be killing it on stage, that gives us all the more reason to watch her destroy in action while we have the chance.
ILIZA SHLESINGER :: Friday, November 14 and Saturday, November 15 at The Chevalier Theatre, 30 Forest St. in Medford, MA :: Times vary, $76.25 to $95 :: Venue and ticket info
Film/TV: ‘Enter The Void’ at Cinema Salem
Life is already surreal as fuck, so we might as well return to the cinema to experience Gaspar Noé’s 2009 experimental drama art-film Enter The Void. Hey, why not? A film about life, drugs, and death, with a menacing 143-minute runtime, it screens at Cinema Salem on Friday night, as part of the Night Light series of cult films, taking us deep into the night and lost inside our own sense of mortality. The much-discussed death scene (not a spoiler) arrives fairly early in the film, and from there it’s a strobe of flashbacks and freak-outs strewn across Tokyo in what’s not always an easy watch. Enter The Void was at the Coolidge for a midnight screening a few years back, when it also landed in V3, so here’s a carry-over of the description: “A grimy and psychedelic out-of-body experience with a flair for extremity and technical wizardry. This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past — where he sees his parents before their deaths — to the present — where he witnesses his own autopsy — and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.”
‘ENTER THE VOID’ :: Friday, November 14 at Cinema Salem, One East India Square in Salem, MA :: 10 p.m., $12 :: Event info and tickets