Heavy Metal: Let’s Take a Ride

Hello everybody! Today for our movie club we have the 80s classic Heavy Metal.

HEAVY METAL

STARRING: Harvey Atkin, Jackie Burroughs, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Marilyn Lightstone, Harold Ramis, Richard Romanus ,Alice Playte

DIRECTOR: Gerald Potterton

GENRE: Adult animated, science fiction, fantasy

YEAR: 1981

COUNTRY: Canada

An astronaut brings home a glowing green orb for his daughter. However, the orb kills him and corners the girl for its purposes. Claiming to the embodiment of all evil, the malevolent sphere, known as the Loc-Nar, terrorizes the little girl by showing a series of bizarre and fantastic tales it has influenced. The first is “Harry Canyon,” a cynical taxi driver in a squalid futuristic New York who finds himself involved with a damsel in distress who is relentlessly pursued by murderous thugs who desire the Loc-Nar her archaeologist father found. The second is “Den” which chronicles the adventures of a nerdish boy who is thrown into the fantasy world of Neverwhere, where he is transformed into a studly naked muscle-man, desired by beautiful women, who must get involved in a conflict revolving around possession of the Loc-Nar.

The third is “Captain Sternn” where the title character is a handsome but irredeemable scoundrel who stands accused in a trial that Loc-Nar throws into chaos. The fourth is “B-17”, where a World War II bomber plane limps home after a bombing run, only to have the Loc-Nar ram into it and revive the dead crew members as murderous zombies. The next is “So Beautiful, So Dangerous” where a buxom secretary at the Pentagon is abducted by stoned alien wastrels and a oversexed robot. The final story is “Taarna”, where the Loc-Nar has to come to a future Earth and changes a peaceful people into a horde of murderous barbarians who rampage with genocidal zeal. Only the last Tarackian, a silent swords-woman known as Taarna, can avenge the victims and stop the Loc-Nar.

Heavy Metal still has a killer sound track 20 years after its release, with powerful songs by Devo, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Journey, Nazareth, and other top bands of the time. Not only does the music not detract from the stories, but it adds to their raw passion and exuberance. One can accurately describe Heavy Metal as bawdy, violent, horrifying, imaginative, shocking, and creative, without beginning to list its many other robust qualities

The film makes liberal use of nudity, sex, violence, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and pretty much everything you would expect out of a film catering to adolescent males. If you’re looking for any sort of deeper meaning, you certainly won’t find much of it here beyond a kind of fatalism that follows the Loc-Nar, the embodiment of evil, and the need for heroism as demonstrated by Den and Taarna. But really, most people watching this film won’t be looking for any deeper meaning, so does it matter that the film has almost none?

Not really.

PROS:

•  Variety of stories.
• Animation.
• Kick-ass soundtrack.
• Voice-acting performance.

CONS:

•  Gratuitous amounts of sex and violence.
• Utter ridiculousness.

SCORE: 7.5 / 10

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