Details from IMDB:
Heavy Metal
A glowing green orb that embodies ultimate evil terrorizes a young girl with an anthology of bizarre and fantastic stories.
Initial Thoughts:
Life can lead you to funny/peculiar places sometimes. I was listening to the song “A Nightmare on My Street” in preparation for a Call of Cthulhu session and I noticed that the song mentioned the movie “Heavy Metal”, furthermore I realized I had never seen that movie! So yesterday was a holiday so I got pleasantly high and watched it.
Main Points:
This is not the easiest movie to describe, I can see how it has become a cult classic because it is certainly unique. Essential it is a collection of short stories all tied together by the evil green orb called Loc-Nar. While I had heard of this movie I had never read the magazine or even watched a trailer, so I went in very fresh. I was expecting it to be really hard core and while I suppose some parts are, because it was done in ’81 it’s not nearly as graphicly violent (or sexual) as something done today (Invincible comes to mine for extreme animated violence). While I didn’t love every story, some were too schlocky for me, I enjoyed most of them and was impressed by the animation for a movie almost over 40 years old, some parts hold up really well and look great! I really enjoyed them comic book look to it and was pleasantly surprised to hear the voices of John Candy, Eugene Levy and Marilyn Lightstone, all of whom are Canadian. This is in fact a Canadian film! Who knew Canada could be so edgy? Also the music is excellent with some great music by Journey, Black Sabbath, Devo, Stevie Knicks, Sammy Hagar and Cheap Trick just to name a few.
Speaking of edgy, it is of course worth noting this is movie is very much ages 19+, lots of nudity, violence, coarse language and drug use. It is also wildly sexist and almost all of the nudity is women and 99% of the women in the film are just there to have sex/service men (with the exception of the last story where she is the hero but is still scantily clad and never speaks). I was high when I watched it and there is one segment where aliens do a load of cocaine and then fly a spaceship, suffice it was say you NEED to be stoned while watching it to get the full effect.
Final Thoughts:
I enjoyed the ending here and thought it tied the story up well. While I’ve heard it’s not as good I am very tempted to watched the sequel, Heavy Metal 2000 and other hand-drawn animated films, I imagine with computer animation and AI they will become even more rare in years to come. Please don’t let your kids watch this, don’t watch this yourself if you’re an uptight/conservative person. Pay attention to when a Mickey Mouse type robot has sex with a red-headed woman, I am fairly certain this was at least partially the inspiration for a scene in Star Trek: TNG when Data has sex with Tasha Yar! This movie was certainly groundbreaking and I enjoyed it a fair bit but as I mentioned I think some of the writing falls flat and you have to notice just how incredibly shitty the female characters are written/treated. For those reasons I give it a 7.5 but would certainly recommend seeing it. Get baked, turn this on and let it wash over you, you’ll be glad you did.