Heavy Metal

It is sad to say, but I didn’t grow up with Heavy Metal like my 80s brethren and I ache because of it. This would have been on VHS rotation had I been in access of it. It just never come across my attention (I’m not even sure why) or was visible to my eyes at the rental store. It wasn’t really until 2007, when I noticed it on VHS in a mom-and-pop (now gone, replaced with a clothing store (*sigh*)) called Movietyme (I drop this from time to time because it was a reminder of the old days when aisles and rows of VHS tapes were all over the place; they had DVDs all over the place, too, though), that Heavy Metal finally caught my happy attention. I rented it three times (!) when Movietyme was in business (it wasn’t in business but maybe four/five years tops; it was a late attempt to appeal to old school movie fans, but the economy was in the absolute shitter during their small era) and fell in love with it. It was exactly what I would have cherished as a nerdy kid who loved loud rock music, animated gore, and big-busted bunnies.
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I can only imagine that I would have seriously dug seeing a convertible with an astronaut riding out of a space ship, entering the atmosphere of Earth. As the car is about to land, there’s even a parachute that opens! Well, the guy heads home, opens a container holding a green orb he “captured” in space, and deteriorated as a result! I miss animation of this sort, even though it might be considered a bit crude and raw compared to the far-preferred (these days) computer generated age we now live. Still seeing this guy just destroyed like that was really awesome stuff. The orb even speaks with this theatrical, authoritative voice that proclaims to be “The Sum of All Evil.” The orb is god-like and mercurial. Science fiction and the orb are a perfect marriage with animation accompanied by rock music in the background. How could I not be one jovial viewer? Of course this all powerful orb was unearthed while miners were digging for mineral deposits, and its discovery (a jewel mankind seeks only to be eviscerated to oblivion by it) is a detriment to mortal life everywhere.

"Damn illegal aliens."

The wraparound with the orb doesn’t quite feed into the first tale smoothly, but, to tell you the truth, it didn’t really matter all that much to me. I think we may put a bit too much stock in wraparounds and the stories that inhabit their core.

I like the first tale’s acknowledgment that perhaps the future, even as transports now fly instead of drive on asphalt around the big city, that New York is still a cesspool full of scum and slime. I also seriously enjoy the idea that its hero is a taxi driver. Just an ordinary guy…who will click a button (near the brake pedal), if you threaten him (or not pay him), that shoots off a “death beam” reducing you to a bad memory. I love that this says you don’t fuck with this guy. He may look like some dumb schmuck you can easily dupe, but he’s no idiotic rube. Receding hairline, Hawaiian shirt, 12 o’clock shadow, potty mouth, cynical attitude (rightfully so), and a glove compartment full of weapons used by crooks looking to hold him up; Harry Canyon is the perfect anti-hero. You know it is a cool Friday night when Harry is finally allowed into the police station (murders happen all the time so the cops are little moved when he informs them his passenger’s father was killed), carrying a dame he picked up while in the moment of fleeing from bad guys wanting her scientist father’s “Loc Nar”, and the background music (as a bevy of dimestore hookers are herded at a bench, smoking cigarettes and having a time of it) is Stevie Nicks.
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I was laughing to myself when I thought about who Mr. Rudnick (with his quadruple-chinned mug, bulging belly, tailored suits, and cigar-smoking) reminded me of…the cover of Warrant’s Dirty, Rotten, Filthy, Stinking Rich.

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In this rotten future, the police charge to investigate crimes! That and the UN building is used as a fleabag apartment complex! Nice future New York to look forward to, eh? Harry brags a bit about how he rocks the scientist daughter’s world in bed, awakening to the police wanting to know her whereabouts. And he has to deal with Rudnick and his goons, all of who are interested in the Loc Nar. Fortunate for Harry, he has a kick-ass taxi that features laser guns that appear with the press of a button (Harry has a set up that allows him to also target them from the comforts of his seat), blasting apart anyone’s vehicles (in this case, hovercrafts featuring Rudnick’s boys) that might be following him. Soon Rudnick offers a deal the scientist’s daughter can’t refuse and she seeks Harry’s assistance: the Loc Nar in exchange for a profitable sum. Harry agrees to 50 % of the take and once the trade is over, she wants it all, pulls a gun on him, and suffers the consequences. Harry momentarily feels a bit bad about how it all went down, but ultimately shrugs it off, looking at it as two days work with a little reward of sex as an extra tip. I really enjoy this tale; Harry Canyon doesn’t overstay its welcome, has a ghetto city sense of humor to it, seeing life in the future as just more of the same, except the crime is much worse, with a little more trash, rats, pollution, buildings stacked closely to each other making New York look stuffed to the gills, and corruption no longer even trying to hide. Canyon just survives in this future because he’s streetwise and smarter than most.

 

Den isn’t up there among my favorites in Heavy Metal, but John Candy’s voice as the nerdy kid whose muscular structure changes when the orb sends him off to another world, where he finds a big-boobed slave-girl about to be sacrificed into a pool to the Loc Nar (once again the source of desire) by a sorceress, is fun to listen to as he narrates his responses to the adventure he’s thrust into. Later, another lecherous ruler wants the Loc Nar, forcing Den to infiltrate the castle of the sorceress to secure it so that his slave girl will be safe from harm. I kind of look at Den as an adult version of Masters of the Universe. The animation is similar and Den has the look of a Conan the Barbarian warrior, chiseled with his pecs and abs. Plus he does battle with a number of alien creatures that resemble humanoid animals (they have primate and bird features but are also muscled and warrior-like, with their spears and staffs), with two villainous leaders (one, a flamboyant heel, the second a lusty seductress) at odds over the Loc Nar, with Den caught in the middle. This seems to be framed as the great nerd fantasy where they gain a bodybuilder’s physique, going off on a quest on some alien world, with voluptuous babes seductively offering themselves for lots of lovin’. You get large bees to ride on in the sky and Den bludgeoning bloodily his foes. I thought it was fun…however, this could be an example of what those critical of the stories in Heavy Metal might consider sexist, male fantasy garbage. To each his own I guess.

You see a trend here in the film, and its wraparound involves the orb, the Loc Nar, and how its influence motivates characters within each tale presented. Here, it is looked upon as a weapon of great power that could give the owner total rule over the planet. As was the case in Harry Canyon, the orb eventually destroys the villains who acquire it.

I was stunned to read that Eugene Levy of all people voiced the lecherous, perverted, morally bankrupt Captain Sternn, with his Superman features and build. Sternn looks like he could stand in the middle of a demolished Metropolis to battle Doomsday. I think that heroic look to him adds to the joke of this “filler” tale (Captain Sternn is the title of it) in Heavy Metal. I think this has a cool set up that kind of peters out until the end when Sternn proves just why he seems to evade a just punishment. I like the intergalactic space station and trial congregation watching as the case brought against Sternn seems iron clad, until the witness against him, a slovenly nobody named Hanover Fiste (get it?), decides to accept a payoff to lie on the stand in his favor…that is until the Loc Nar (now reduced to the size of a marble) morphs him into a bulging-muscles, titanic steroid freak on the verge of ripping Sternn limb-for-limb while the aliens and robots flee for their lives. Not even the judge and lawyers want any part of this, hitting the bricks. I dug Cheap Trick’s “Reach Out” as Freak Fiste chases after Sternn who eventually knows exactly how to calm him down…cold, hard green. That is until the trap door offers him a bye-bye. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. Probably one of the lesser tales in this fun movie, but hearing John Vernon as the prosecutor lay into Sternn is neat…he always had that judgmental, authoritarian voice. The animation is very comic book which I liked, the character of Sternn could have been plucked right from DC.

B-17 is perhaps my favorite of the animated stories in Heavy Metal; with its WWII bombers under enemy fire and the soldiers inside killed (all but one ship downed; and its crew, except the pilots in the cockpit, are killed by bullet-fire), the Loc Nar orb turns the corpses into skeletal zombie ghouls right out of your worst nightmare. While the one pilot is searching the plane for survivors in the crew, he succumbs to a zombie who tears him limb for limb, while the final pilot is able to parachute from it just in the nick of time. However, he lands on an island which, the pilot discovers, is a bomber plane graveyard, and these decaying vessels aren’t the only skeletal remains he will encounter.

 

While Sternn seems right out of DC, B-17 seems out of EC Comics. Not only is it a return to history, but it incorporates scary ghouls with flesh resembling sewage on the bones. The bombers crashed on the island and the pilot surrounded by ghouls, this is certainly a scenario I can’t envision any of us would ever wish to find ourselves. The animated ghouls are wicked cool. War is hell. While the orb factors only slightly (its evil manifesting corpses into zombies to kill), it still serves its purpose which is important as a wraparound device.

Oh, wow, good niborg!

 Of the tales, I think this one, So Beautiful, So Dangerous, would be at home in a double feature with Felix the Cat and feels like a close relative of Mad Magazine. Alien stoners kidnapping a Pentagon aid (right out of the Pentagon!), snorting Plutonium Niborg (Alien coke) on the floor (“Nose dive!”), and an authority in top secret matters being sucked into a probe device used to pull objects and such into the alien ship (the aid fared better than the Pentagon scientist who, once deposited from the alien probe sucking tube, is in pieces!). This really is all a comedy with the aliens getting stoned while their robot companion bangs the earth babe they picked up out of the Pentagon! Watch for these guys when docking in your space station! The babe agrees to marry the robot, wanting a Jewish wedding and wondering if it is circumcised! The earth babe is a bit concerned he might be unfaithful, afraid she will catch him shagging a toaster!

 

Harold Ramis’ voice as one of the hippy stoner aliens (“Hey, man…”) and John Candy as the robot who gets lucky, add entertainment value to So Beautiful, So Dangerous, but this tale, like others before it, knows when to quit and doesn’t overstay its welcome. It knows that the joke—dopehead aliens, a bimbo from the Pentagon, and a trip to the space station that ends with the ship wrecking inside the docking bay, as well as, a “smiling” ship they occupy and sight gags (like MacDonalds, “Drive Thru”, and “Martians Are People, Too” throughout the space station) to look out for—would wear thin if this lasted too long.

 

The final tale of Heavy Metal, Taarna,  is more of a sword and sandals epic packaged in science fiction as a race of scientists and philosophers are overrun by the Loc Nar possessed warriors turned evil (by the orb’s toxic influence on a volcano, with green lava engulfing and taking physical and mental control of a nearby canon of people who gather to see what it was, since the Loc Nar appeared from space onto their planet), needing a great female warrior to come to their aid as prophesied. Considered dead, a race of Tarak, known as protector/defender, have one final member of them, sworn to uphold a solemn duty from their very blood, with no choice. The final members of the city (considered the leaders) summon Taarna, of the Tarakian race, to defend them, but can she against such great a foe as the Loc Nar?

The score you’d think was by Basil Poledouris, the way it builds upon the epic nature of the story of revenge and defeat against an enemy; a female warrior rises up as her birthright intended to find and slay the leader of the army of marauders who left those that summoned her (and their citizens slaughtered in the city just for the hell of it thanks to the evil of the orb) either severed apart or arrowed and bloody. Of course, as is expected, Taarna spends all her time buck naked or scantily clad, with the athletic curves and shapely boobs of a female warrior. Sword in hand (blessed by the power of her people and wielded with great skill), Tarna will behead and conquer her foes (starting with a barroom three-on-one disadvantage, and then later one-on-one with the chief villain and his mechanized hand that, in this fight, has a spinning saw blade).

Taarna and her large bird (that rescues her out of bad situations) is an impressive sight that produces memorable moments, the violence is graphic and explicit with bodies massacred in great detail, the major heavy of the tale is larger-than-life and ferocious in his charge on the city, leading his possessed, cold-blooded assassins, and has a look of intimidation that is perfect heading into his showdown (which resembles a western gunfight). And any hot babe lopping off heads with a shiny sword while costumed in a barely-there bikini is the very essence of a teenage wet dream. That, to me, seems to be what Heavy Metal is all about.

The final conclusion has Tarna becoming a martyr so that Loc Nar will be vanquished, while the daughter of the astronaut who brought home to Earth this orb replaces her as the next heroine guardian, riding off on a reincarnated version of the previous bird. While it seems Loc Nar has been silenced, a celebratory narrative voice tells us another generation has been saved from its evil.

Heavy Metal is every bit the culmination of artists giving birth to what thrills the teenage geek, which I still remain in heart if not in age. Sure, I might not anticipate and get googly-eyed at animated nudity as I did at 15, but I can admire the female form so physically stunning as those who use the comic artform as a vehicle to populate the screen with as much as is allowed to them. The vast variety of content within the anthology also offers a little to every nerd. And most of the tales (the last one does get more time and should, considering it is basically the headliner for the film) are given just the right amount of screen time. Its influence has remained. Anime has thrived since Heavy Metal and I often think of this film when I watch adult animation catered to an audience of a particular niche.