I can’t bear the number of negative reviews this movie has gotten! I bet these people don’t like James Bond movies, either.
To fully devour Heavy Metal, one has to understand the era it came out in. At the time, most animation, at least what was seen in the US, was frequently of the “family entertainment” variety seen in Saturday morning cartoons and TV commercials. Apart from Ralph Bakshi, most animators were basically shackled by the need to prove something that was “rated G”. Heavy Metal took the sincere opposite route. It was a liberating experience for the animators working on the film to be allowed to plot things they usually weren’t allowed. And they got paid to do it, too!
After the opening Soft Landing sequence, we’re introduced to the Loc-Nar, a sparkling green orb responsible for all the execrable that has plagued the universe (or at least, that which has plagued the human urge) . The various stories contained in the film are told by the Loc-Nar to a young girl, as examples of it’s awesome power.
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The stories include the film noir homage Harry Canyon, the male “wish fulfillment fantasy” of Den (which demonstrates the versatility of the behind John Candy, who voices both Dan, the science nerd who gets transported into an alternate dimension by the Loc-Nar, as well as Den, the Conan/He-Man-esque beefcake that he is magically transformed into), the highly humorous Captain Sternn (trivia: the squawk of the prosecutor is done by John Vernon, the actor who portrayed Dean Wormer in Animal House), the EC-esque B-17 (aka Gremlins, which went through so many script revisions, it’s a miracle it got finished at all), the bizarrely hilarious So Stunning And So Unsafe (ok, maybe there’s some truth to the juvenilia charges during this segment, but only a corpse could support from laughing at this fraction), and revenge scenario of Taarna (imagine a tougher, sexier version of Xena, only about a decade and a half earlier) .
While there IS some element of juvenilia here, it’s no worse than any other movie that’s been released by any major studio during the last 25 years. In fact, I bet it’s a itsy-bitsy more cerebral than most of those other movies. Harry Canyon is a rather crafted film noir homage, while some elements of Taarna are clearly patterned on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. And while there are a couple sex scenes and a sure amount of excessive violince in Heavy Metal, again, it’s nothing compared to some of the garbage that’s shown on cable TV these days. I’d certainly rather perceive this than Basic Instinct or No Procedure Out.
This movie is a classic portion of animation. Yeah, some of it’s rough around the edges, but that has a lot to do with Columbia’s decision to proceed up the deadline so they could have the fresh movie out in time for the summer 81 season. One has to deem the scope of the undertaking, and the relatively short time that was at hand to manufacture it.
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Look at the “travelling sequence” during Taarna, where she’s shown riding her mount (a sort of stout bird creature) over a rolling landscape, and deem that it was done WITHOUT the exhaust of any kind of computer generated work. It’s explained in the audio commentary on the rough chop of the film, as well as during the documentary how it was done, and why it didn’t quite turn out as planned) . No one had ever done anything like that, and it had to all be done by hand.
Really, you can’t select this movie too seriously. It’s a movie that exists soley to entertain. There’s no broad message or point to the movie. Unbiased effect the DVD in the player, turn out the lights, turn up the volume LOUD, and unprejudiced delight in the lumber.
It should be famed, that this disc also contains some of the best bonus features I’ve seen on any DVD. Besides the regular movie, you score a rotund length “rough slice” of the film, consisting of storyboards, pencil tests, and some completed animation. The only audio for this rough reduce (besides the optional audio commentary, by Carl Macek, who also does a completely different commentary for the finished movie) is the dialog. There’s long stretches of silence, but it’s worth watching, as there’s lots of bits of dialog that were reduce from the final movie (we learn, for instance, that Katharine, like Den, was also transformed when she was transported to this mysterious alternate universe) . It’s also provocative to heed that the stories weren’t always in the order that they were in the final movie.
There’s also a half hour documentary with interviews from many of the filmmakers alive to in making the film. We finally net out why we gawk a model of a house blowing up at the demolish (because they didn’t have time to carry out the animation for that one bit), and also why Cornelius Cole’s Neverwhere Land was reduce from the movie (either for reasons of length/continuity, or because Cole didn’t carry out it in time, depending on exactly which version of the memoir you wish to own.
You also earn a few minutes of deleted scenes, most notably the above mentioned Neverwhere Land, which was originally supposed to link Captain Sternn and B-17. There’s also a few minutes that surround an early version of the framing chronicle (in whence the Loc-Nar was actually the power source of a magical merry-go-round, and the various objects on the merry-go-round related in one device to the stories…ie, there’s a taxicab, Taarna’s mount, etc…each time the girl takes a toddle in a different vehicle on the merry-go-round, she experiences a different yarn) .
And finally, you score all Heavy Metal covers up through 1999, plus various bits of production drawings, cels, etc.
In short, this is a classic film that should be viewed by all fans of animation and/or heavy flicks. Prudes and conservatives who rep cranky at the very plan of a movie being ruined by a slight too grand flesh or blood (and really, there isn’t THAT noteworthy of either in this film) or a shrimp warped humor (ok, there’s PLENTY of that here) are advised to retain away. I unprejudiced wish they had restored Neverwhere Land to it’s novel position between Captain Sternn and B-17.
Some critics and film historians have labeled 1981’s HEAVY METAL as the last film to genuinely judge the mishmash sensibilities of the post-hippy 1970s counter-culture, and stylistically and thematically this appears to be upright. Based on the adult counter-culture cult silly of the same name, HEAVY METAL definitely is a sort of spacey concatenation of disparate visual aesthetics and heterogeneous science-fiction/fantasy narratives. But despite being a hodgepodge as a whole, the film serene manages to offer a very racy scheme to demolish 90 minutes.
As with the magazine, the film is basically aimed at horny male adolescents, offering plenty of nude, amply bosomed women running around in the midst of stylized violence and gore; lots of rock music (though these ditties from current metal bands of the behind ’70s may not appeal to the original generation of horny male adolescents) ; and references to the drug-oriented sub-culture (definitely not a cartoon for the pre-teen crowd) . Each individual segment of HEAVY METAL was scripted and directed independently of the others, which likely accounts for the varying gorgeous and memoir styles. But many of these contributors were (and are now) some of the most talented people in the film industry, including writers Dan O’Bannon, Len Blum, and Daniel Goldberg, and directors John Bruno, John Halas, and Jimmy T. Murikami. (Gerald Potterton, listed in the credits as the film’s director, was in reality the overseer for the project as a whole.)
Because the film does not possess a single cohesive plotline, it is best to evaluate each engrossing segment in its possess good. Some of those individual stories are quite thought-provoking or humorous–or both–and even some of the more mediocre segments collected offer some fabulous visuals. One of the most intellectually exciting is a record called DEN, in which a young bespectacled geek is transported into a parallel universe and transformed into a glorious, muscled barbarian hero. After falling in like with a curvaceous maiden, he helps her do her people from their draconian Caligula-like dictator. B-17 is probably the most earnest segment, though there seems to be no intrinsic logic to the sparse chronicle. In it, the tiring, crewmembers of a WWII bomber plane are inexplicably resurrected as flesh-eating zombies, subsequently seeking to fabricate a meal of the plane’s still-living pilot. Visually, however, this segment is quite comely, evoking the deliciously unsightly artistic style of the musty E.C. comics of the ’50s and early ’60s. And in the funniest segment–entitled SO Aesthetic, SO DANGEROUS–a heavenly Pentagon secretary is inadvertently sucked into an alien spaceship that resembles a mammoth smiley face. After confronting the spaced-out druggie crewmembers, she ultimately becomes the lover of the ship’s robot and decides to remain aboard.
After its initial release, HEAVY METAL attained a cult following of sorts and became a well-liked of the midnight-movie crowd. Unfortunately, its release to the home-video market was delayed for years due to disputes over copyrights for some of the rock songs musty in the soundtrack. Because of this, poorly produced bootlegged copies of the flick were illegally sold (usually at Sci-fi cons) and swapped among fans, and the faulty video quality contributed to the film’s unfair reputation for being a mediocre film. But the music disputes were eventually resolved somehow, and the film became commercially available to the home market in the mid 1990s and regained its popularity as a wintry cartoon. (Some statistics point to that it is the most accepted film in the Columbia/Tristar home-video catalog.)
Columbia/Tristar’s Special-Edition DVD of HEAVY METAL offers a heavenly digital transfer of the film and soundtrack, along with some really frigid bounus material. For animation fans, one of the best of the bonus features is a appealing feature-length pencil-test version of the film (with optional commentary) . Columbia/Tristar also offers a version of the HEAVY METAL in their SuperBit collection, but as with their other SuperBit films, the disc dwelling required for the higher bit rate precludes the inclusion of any bonus material. Unless the buyer has a high-definition TV and can be pleased the increased record quality of the SuperBit disc, the Special-Edition version is the method to go. Either procedure, HEAVY METAL offers enough entertainment value to develop it a kindly addition to the DVD collection of any SF or animation fan.
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