EDMONTON - You'd think that Marilyn Manson would be the new Alice Cooper, the heir apparent to the throne of shock rock, the chosen ghoul to fill some pretty big golf shoes --but nope, it's Rob Zombie.

It figures. Alice is a right-wing Christian conservative (talk about shocking). Manson is not. Mr. Zombie, on the other hand, has strong ideological footing in horror comics from the '50s and '60s and seems to enjoy graphic depictions of bloody carnage, left and right. Alice Cooper gets killed. Rob Zombie kills. It's a perfect fit.

Last night's Gruesome Twosome show at Rexall Place last night lived up to its title and then some. Rob Zombie actually had the better pitch of the two, to give you an idea how badly Alice sang.

The ghoulish Godfather's hoarse bark made it difficult even to tell what note he was going for, while Zombie's guttural shouts over a multi-media heavy metal spectacular was more of a challenge to comprehension.

None of the 7,000 fans who turned up last night seemed to mind. Maybe these unwholesome rock stars were singing so horribly because of all horrible things they were singing about--death, devils, demons, vampires, monsters, madmen, evil nurses, living dead girls, witches in ditches, you name it, did we mention death? Satan? Again, this is not a glorification of such things, it's a mockery. The result? Pure entertainment.

It was age before beauty, or something, as Alice went first. At this point in his career, the 62-year-old rocker has refined his hoary old schtick into rock 'n' roll burlesque. He knows how comical it is. As he strained and howled his way through his hits, opening with School's Out and dwelling particularly on selections from Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice impaled a stage-hand with a microphone stand, was decapitated by a guillotine and then kissed his own severed head, which isn't easy to do.

He murdered a bridesmaid in Guilty, abused her corpse in Cold Ethyl, was skewered by a giant syringe in Poison, strangled a naughty nurse in Be My Lover and lopped off a baby's head in Billion Dollar Babies.

At the end of Only Women Bleed, he was given his comeuppance and hung -- which is much preferable to hearing him attempt the song's climactic high note.

And all this before returning in a mirrored tuxedo to end with Under My Wheels, a song about running over some clingy ex-lover with your car. All in good fun.

Total death tally: Stage hands 2, female sidekick 2, Alice Cooper 4.

Alice wins again.

Rob Zombie's set, by contrast, had more of a modern, stylized, less literal approach to the shock-horror genre. If Alice was old-school hell, then Zombie was techno hell.

On a stage festooned with skeletons, flaming braziers and risers covered with television screens, Zombie and band (which includes a guy who used to play with Marilyn Manson) opened with What Lurks on Channel X before a non-stop barrage of speedy horror metal that showed just how far this sort of thing has come since Welcome to My Nightmare.

The usual Zombie selections accompanied by the usual imagery were present and accounted for: B-movie villains in songs about monsters, Charles Manson in a song about blood, comic book carnage in a song about aliens, scenes from his sick movie House of 1,000 Corpses in the title song from same and so on. It was all a bit desensitizing, both musically and otherwise.

For all its entertainment value, there was something missing from Alice's show. It needed better special effects than the usual cheap props he's been employing for decades. And Zombie's set could've used a little of the old-school charm and showmanship that oozed from Alice's every pore. Hey, these guys ought to team up for a series of gruesome duets. Zombie could be the executioner, Alice the victim, Zombie the brawn, Alice the brains. Brains ...

Such a show would kill in Las Vegas.