Viking Night: Heavy Metal
By Bruce Hall
May 29, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But before I continue, let’s get something out of the way. Review or commentary on Heavy Metal tends to fall into one of two categories. There are the egghead reviews that are 500 word rants about how the film is nothing more than a 90 minute homage to gaping head wounds and women with massive breasts. And then there are the people eager to cultivate Geek Cred with their readership, and they wax on about how Heavy Metal is a pioneering work of art, and if you can’t handle that it’s because you aren't as clever and sophisticated as the writer. I can’t entirely agree with either view.
I’m about 60/40 on that, in fact. I guess I’m a fan of Heavy Metal but I will admit it’s for the same reasons I still giggle at Tom and Jerry cartoons - it’s the nostalgia factor. And, maybe I’m still a little immature. On the other hand, the movie is also an excellent example of something that should be celebrated simply because it’s never going to happen again. So, you want to make a hand drawn film about an evil green beach ball and an albino Victoria’s Secret model who rides a giant plucked chicken into battle against a space zombie with a mechanical hand? And it’s going to be rated R?
It has now been done once, and it will never happen again. And before you fire off an email to me entitled “Heavy Metal 2000”, may I remind you: See? I told you so.
As I mentioned earlier, Heavy Metal Episode One was inspired by the magazine, which is basically an erotic art periodical. The sexuality and violence were toned down for the movie, but the spirit of the original remains. In fact, the movie’s...um...”plot”...is based in part on material from the magazine. Stop me if it sounds familiar, or if your name is Luc Besson. There’s this giant, incredibly smug ball of pure evil that threatens civilization, you see. It annihilates everything and everyone it touches and just when all seems lost, only a scantily clad woman, designated by prophecy, and with incredible breasts, can save us from our own shortsightedness.
With violence. And nudity. And then some more violence.
There. I've literally described the entire plot. It’s not much, but the blanks are filled in by a series of vignettes, each presented Twilight Zone style. And, each is animated by a different studio - which is part of the appeal/distraction, depending on your point of view. The giant ball of evil in question is called the Lok-Nar, a malevolent entity that claims to be the source of all horribleness in the universe. The Lok-Nar has just been retrieved by the world's coolest astronaut, who brings it back from space in a tricked out Chevy as a gift for his daughter, right before it horribly disintegrates him.
And if you think the verb "disintegrate" does not need a modifier, you need to watch the scene.
The Lok-Nar torments the frightened child by telling her a series of stories, each meant to reflect the way evil influences the way we act, and how supposedly powerless we all are to prevent it. We find out that the Girl is the only being in the universe who can destroy the Lok-Nar, therefore it felt drawn to seek her out and destroy her. Now, the observable universe is said to be about 28 billion light years in diameter. It seems to me if you wanted to avoid someone you could just pick a direction, hit Ludicrous Speed, and call it good. But no, the Lok-Nar chooses to seek out the one person who can kill it, murders her father and then mocks her for the next 87 minutes.
Which, interestingly, is what eventually gives her the strength to resist.
Yeah, you can see how this is going to turn out before five minutes are up. The rest of the movie is really just killing time between bookends. Your high school film teacher might decry this as the kind of masturbatory film making that is destroying cinema as we know it. Meanwhile, the World of Warcraft set will hail this as an artistic masterpiece; an ironic anthem of female empowerment where the women wear brass thongs and carry massive, phallic swords BECAUSE they are strong and confident. Not because they’re sex objects.
Honestly, I can see both sides of this - the adolescent inside me is totally okay with supermodels in Marika Vera body armor beheading trolls because...HELL YEAH!. The smaller, more mature part of me knows that this film is largely a jumbled mess of gratuitous violence and raging hormones. In fact, one of the challenges of telling a story in this format is that for the broader narrative to be effective, the individual chapters must connect to each other in clear ways that move everything forward. Otherwise, the experience feels fractured and manipulative. That's my biggest problem with Heavy Metal - the sense of narrative disconnection.
Each vignette more or less deals with the machinations and wages of greed and avarice, deceit and murder. Each occurs in a different, progressively more fantastic setting. Sometimes we’re in space. Sometimes we’re in World War II. And sometimes, they're in another dimension that looks like Middle Earth, if Jim Henson and Hugh Hefner designed it. Unfortunately, none of these vignettes tie together clearly with the others. They’re obviously supposed to, but they don’t. The result is a rather empty visual feast - all terrifically imaginative stuff, unless you're looking for something resembling a coherent story.
Still, there are some genuinely great things about Heavy Metal. film should open with an astronaut streaking from space in a 1960 Corvette with tasty guitar licks wailing from the speakers (just how I planned to show up at my high school reunion). The Harry Canyon sketch is amusing because it's the only thing I can think of for the first 20 minutes of The Fifth Element. The sweetness in John Candy's voice is what gives the third sketch life, and you’re a hard person if that doesn’t make you smile. And the B-17 sketch could only have been improved with the addition of William Shatner and an animatronic gremlin.
The film's final chapter is arguably the best, offering the most visceral examination of good versus evil that you'll see in the entire film. The problem is that they all seem arbitrary and pointless. Clearly the intent is for each story to serve as a sort of macabre fable - but most of the time the intended “lesson” is obscured by giant boobs, gratuitous bloodshed and screaming guitars. To some extent, the film is forced to re-establish momentum several times and even if you don’t mind the adolescent tone of the whole thing, you might find it hard to care about what’s happening.
But if you can appreciate genuine effort and forgive the overreach that often comes with ambition, you might find yourself moderately fascinated. A violent, big budget animated sex romp like this simply doesn't happen in 2012 - at least, not outside Japan. And not just because marrying a brutal teenage sex-fantasy with the concept of morality is hard to do without involving giant fighting robots. It’s because the landscape of film has changed since 1981. Today this kind of project is most likely to appear on Adult Swim, the quality of animation making Heavy Metal look like it was made yesterday. And these days, you'd be hard pressed to put together an appropriately eclectic soundtrack without ending up with a self indulgent Emo train wreck.
God, I can almost hear Trent Reznor and Evanescence sobbing and moaning away. The point is that for better or worse, Heavy Metal is an artifact of a bygone time. I don’t mean to imply that hand drawn animation is a lost art, because it’s not. But its days as the driving force behind a major release like this are over. The look of Heavy Metal is distinctive, but well past dated. I personally find it fascinating, but unless you’re just a fan of animation you’re not likely to agree.
Truth be told, even when the movie was new it was never pretty enough to entirely overcome its deficiencies. But some of them are overcome by a killer soundtrack stuffed with rock classics - and most of the songs fit very well with whatever is happening on screen at the time. It’s almost worth watching Heavy Metal just to experience how deeply the music affects your visual and mental perception of the story. They got the soundtrack right, and it’s a good thing. Without it I’m not sure this movie has the cult following that it does today.
I look at Heavy Metal sitting there in my video collection and wonder when I would have watched it again had I not decided to write about it. Eventually, sure. But it’s a little bit like those really nice brown dress shoes I have that don’t go with anything, or my bomber jacket from high school. They’re both hopelessly obsolete, and yet I can’t bear to forget them. Frankly, they belong in a museum, not with me. And it’s hard not to feel a little like that when I watch Heavy Metal. It’s still pretty cool, but not as much as it was the last time I saw it.
But what IS a video collection if not a museum of sorts? Someday I will have no more use for supermodels in metal bikinis, or their swords and dragons. But I’ll always cherish my imagination and as long as I have that, there will be a special place in my heart - and on my bookshelf - for Heavy Metal.