Canadian movies are raising a little hell, musically speaking

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Trooper is having a moment. The Canadian band’s rock anthem Raise a Little Hell, a hit from their fourth studio album, Thick as Thieves, is on the soundtrack of three new Canadian films this season. The 1978 track can be heard punching up the emotion in several key scenes.

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Its first appearance was in the true-crime comedy Bandit, where it provides a backdrop to the opening scene of a daylight raid on a bank, the cool-as-a-cucumber robber (Josh Duhamel) escaping in plain sight, dressed for a Shriner’s convention.

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Next up, Drinkwater, in which the song kicks in as a pretty woman emerges from the passenger side of a pickup truck, hair flowing improbably in slow motion as the camera follows her form rom toe to head.

Finally, the Quebec film Rosie, about a group of Montreal misfits who help a woman raise the niece she barely knows, after her sister dies. This time it plays over a scene of them arriving at a funeral, her two best friends defiantly dressed in drag despite the disapproving looks of everyone around them.

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Allan Ungar, the Toronto director of Bandit, says he’d originally wanted to use the song Money (That’s What I Want) by Barrett Strong. But that 1959 hit has recently appeared in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and “the price was so jacked up that we couldn’t afford it.”

“It parallels to what Josh is trying to do,” he explains. Raise a Little Hell did that as well, and delivers “the kind of energy you expect, and says to the audience: We’re in for a good time.”

Coincidentally, all three movies feature a connection to the era in which the song was released. Bandit, based on the true story of dashing bank robber Robert Whiteman, is set in Canada in the mid-1980s, when he committed his daring crimes. Rosie takes place in Montreal in 1984. And Drinkwater, while set in the present day, has a kind of ’80s vibe as well, perhaps because it’s a loose remake of a student film that was shot in 1981.

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It helps that the song remains popular and well-known, but hasn’t been overused in film and TV; prior to this rock hat-trick, it played during season one of Stranger Things in 2016, and in the 2011 Nicholas Cage movie Drive Angry. “I hear it on the radio driving around Toronto all the time,” Ungar adds.

It’s also nice to hear Canadian music in a Canadian movie, something all three films deliver. Rosie features several tracks by the Canuck new wave bands Spoons and Blue Peter. Bandit’s CanCon cuts include Making It Work from Doug and the Slugs, and Burton Cummings’ My Own Way to Rock. And Drinkwater delivers tunes by April Wine, Men Without Hats, Corey Hart, Loverboy, The Kings and more.

“It’s the power of music,” Ungar says simply of Trooper’s hit. It certainly is, and if you know the song at all, its opening blast of electric guitar and eight beats on the cymbal will have you primed to jump into the super simple lyrics. Just please wait until you’re outside the cinema before breaking into song.