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The Appropriate Tune - "Heavy Metal" by Sammy Hagar
In 1974 a group of four Frenchman, Jean Giraud, Phillippe Druillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Bernard Farkas came together to launch the magazine Mètal hurlant, or Heavy Metal as it came to be known in the United States. Much like the British magazine 2000 AD released three years later, Heavy Metal was an anthology series, showcasing comic adaptations of science fiction and horror stories by established novelists and writers like Harlan Ellison and Grant Morrison. Although it never had a breakout star like 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd it did have a large following, due in part to the amazing work by artists like Jean Giraud (also known as Moebius) which only highlighted its more risque, experimental material. Although its parent company has undergone some changes over the years, it’s run by Heavy Metal Media LLC at the moment, the American version of the magazine has been running consistently since 1977, which is pretty good when you consider that no one reads magazines anymore.
That this kind of niche genre magazine would spawn it’s own theatrical film feels almost unbelievable in hindsight, and that it would be animated is almost like a dream. Take Ralph Bakshi out of the equation and you could probably count the amount of adult-oriented animated films coming out of Western theaters on one hand, and most of those would probably be in French (so few that I’ve actually already seen this film, but it was so long ago that impressions should be suitably fresh). Or perhaps this was the only time that it could happen, when Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons was sweeping across the youth of America and studios were throwing bags of money at anything and everything that they saw in the hopes of it becoming the next big thing. I mean if Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon got their own movies and TV series despite not being relevant since the Eisenhower administration, then why not take a chance with something popular AND current? This is the 1980’s baby, nothing but smooth sailing from here on out.
Released in 1981, Heavy Metal was written by Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum (based on stories by Dan O’Bannon, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie and Thomas Warkentin), directed by Gerald Potterton, and produced by Ivan Reitman (Animal House, Ghostbusters, et cetera) through Potterton Productions. One day in the infinite vacuum of space, an astronaut drops out of a space shuttle in a muscle car and lands on a nearby planet. The astronaut’s name is Grimaldi, and he’s just returned home to give his daughter a gift from his interstellar travels: a glowing green orb. This turns out to be a mistake, as the orb immediately melts Grimaldi like he’s ice cream on a hot. It turns out that not only is this orb sentient, it’s also the sum of all evil, whose powers are beyond human comprehension. With the girl as his unwilling captive, the orb (or the Loc-Nar as we come to learn) shows her visions of its history and the various ways it has inserted itself into the lives and humanity and twisted events toward its own ends. In one it is the dystopian year of 2031 a New York cabbie named Harry Canyon is pulled into a web of stolen jewels and mobsters. In another, a teenage boy finds a strange glowing meteorite in his backyard that transports him to another world and another body. What is the purpose of the Loc-Nar’s visions? What is its goal? Probably nothing good, you know considering the whole ‘sum of all evil’ thing, but you know how magic orbs can be.
As I wrote earlier it was the art that made the Heavy Metal magazine as big as it was, and it is the same for the Heavy Metal film. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before really; Gandahar and Bakshi’s Fire & Ice are similar, but neither of those films comes close to the diversity of art and animation showcased in Heavy Metal, which makes sense when you consider Potterton’s previous work on another famously wild animated feature, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. From rotoscoping to hand-drawn animation, from realism to the cartoon and the grotesque, from incredibly intricate painted landscapes to the swirling paint backgrounds you’d see in something like Zabriskie Point, and shit like the opening scene with the muscle car where I don’t even know what I’m looking at, I thought it was stop-motion at first. Not only does it serve to make each individual story and thus the film as a whole feel unique but the wild experimentation makes it easier to forgive issues like the slow animation speed in many scenes, which studious readers will recall was the death knell for Rock & Rule in my opinion. If you ever wished looking at prog rock album covers were a multimedia experience, look no further than Heavy Metal.
Besides the art, the other thing that made Heavy Metal an instant cult classic was it’s star-studded soundtrack that contained very little in the way of metal songs. You’ve got an appearance by the Dio-era Black Sabbath and maybe Blue Oyster Cult if you stretched the definition, but the rest -- Devo, Cheap Trick, Journey, is prime cut dad rock and I’m kind of into it. The title track by Sammy Hagar is coke-fueled motorcycle rocketing into space kind of song, criminally underutilized in the actual film given how much of a banger it is. The two tracks contributed by Don Felder of Eagles fame, “Take a Ride” and “All of You” are also surprisingly good considering how lame the Eagles usually are, the kinds of songs that could not have been made if marijuana never existed. Of course none of these songs are really relevant to what’s happening on screen, Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” plays during an attack on a city which kind of works but then they also have a bar band in a sword-and-sorcery post-apocalyptic world playing Devo’s “Through Being Cool” for some reason, but if you’re already high and looking at animated people having sex proper context isn’t a strong priority. The score by Elmer Bernstein is also quite good, but to be honest I don’t remember it as much as as the bands.
Speaking of star-studded, Heavy Metal’s voice acting game isn’t half bad either. John Candy is perhaps the most obvious for listeners, taking center stage in the segment ‘Den’ as well as several other roles, but if you’re an SCTV fan you’ll also recognize the voices of Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy as well. Eagle-eared listeners might also know that the voice of Hanover Fist in ‘Captain Sternn’ is Rodger Bumpass, Squidward Tentacles himself, in his debut voice acting role. As with the soundtrack I don’t think that certain voices really fit the context of the story, John Candy doesn’t really sound like an 18 year old boy or a tanned muscle man, he sounds like John Candy, but in general it’s solid. Not Emmy award-winning performances, but you get the idea.
That marijuana line earlier exposes the main takeaway from Heavy Metal for better or worse however, that it is a spectacle. Of all the segments in the film only three, ‘Harry Canyon’, ‘Den’, and ‘Taarna’ (the latter of which ties into the main plot) could be said to be proper stories, if very truncated. The rest feel like teasers for movies that were never finished, briefly touching upon ideas that might have said something but quickly vanish as we push forward to the next one. While the film is technically building towards the moral of good triumphing over evil, most of that 90 minutes you’re just looking at tits and people getting melted, and the ending feels so rushed and ultimately contrived that it strips any meaning away from any potential messages. Had the film used the Loc-Nar are simply an artifact and the events more an side effect of people succumbing to their base urges, gradually building up to the sinister truth it might have worked out, but instead we’re hit right away with Marble Satan and this fairy-tale interpretation of morality which is incongruous with the cynicism present in most of the film.
Heavy Metal is an idiosyncratic film. So much so that even though it was a hit at the box office, earning 20 million dollars over a nine million budget, we never saw a hint of a possible sequel until almost two decades later with the much maligned Heavy Metal 2000. For those fans of animation, hallucinogens, underground comix or even just weird art then this is an easy recommendation, and it’s where I tend to lean personally. If you prefer your science fiction with a little more meat on the bone however, the story over looks, this might end up feeling like the music video that never ends. Either way it’s a conversation-starter, so if you’ve got kids get them out of the room and if you don’t get in the mood when you put this movie on, and get ready for an interesting Halloween.
