We all have that list of movies that we’ve never gotten around to watching. Some are classics that people love, others over-rated garbage. I caught a tonne of shit from friends a few years back when they found out I’d never seen “The Princess Bride”. They were left even more unimpressed when I finally did watch it and told them I regarded the movie as “a wet, limp handshake from a person I never needed to meet”.
Heavy Metal was always a weird obscurity for me. You’d never see it on the shelves or on TV. For the longest time I thought it was just a long-form music video built around rock music, as opposed to a fully-fledged animated anthology movie. There’s a lot of things I didn’t know about Heavy Metal, and I spent the longest time not bothered to dig it out and see what all the fuss was about.
Heavy Metal is based off the ongoing French comic series “Metal Hurlant”, which featured the artwork of legendary illustrator Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) among others. It’s wild mix of past, present and future technologies in vast alien worlds gave it a unique appeal and scope matching that of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”.
So in short, Heavy Metal the movie is about a green menacing orb that accosts a young terrified girl in her home and forces her to witness a series of events spanning space and time in which the same orb has corrupted societies, killed anyone or anything who tried to wield its power and turned entire worlds into desolate wastelands.
To Summarize, it heavily features:
- Violence
2. Agonizing Deaths
3. War
4. Titties
5. A Lot Of Weird Shit
6. Ritual Sacrifice
7. More Titties
The big surprise of Heavy Metal for me (apart from how much I liked it), was the people involved. It was produced by the guy who directed “Ghostbusters”. It features original music from Devo, Blue Oyster Cult, and Black Sabbath. It also boasts voice work from Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis (Egon), and John Candy.
I’m so glad I finally gave this movie a chance. I went in with no expectations and it just blew my balls off. I was also so nice to see classic animation again. I loved the lack of smoothness, how slow and clunky it looks, compared to the slick flawless stuff being produced today.
Give it a whirl if you like 80’s fvcked up sci-fi.
And tits. Watch it if you like tits.
