Heavy Metal (1981)

 

Heavy Metal is a comics magazine that commenced publishing in 1977.  It began primarily as a licensed translation of the French science-fantasy magazine Metal Hurlant, but soon expanded its remit to a wide variety of creators both European and American.  Within a few years, it had become known for its exceptional art, and also for its graphic sexual and violent content.  This combination proved commercially successful in the mostly highly-sanitised US comics market of the time, and by 1981, the magazine's publisher had managed to persuade Ivan Reitman to co-produce this $9 million animated film.

Heavy Metal the movie is comprised of an anthology of stories adapted from the magazine, all linked by an original framing story about an intelligent, evil artefact known as the Loc-Nar, which is brought to Earth by an astronaut and after killing the man, begins terrorising his young daughter.

Meanwhile the adapted stories are a combination of one-shots and individual episodes from recurring features from the magazine, specifically the Den and Captain Sternn (with 2 n's).  The former was a highly sexualised planetary fantasy in the John Carter mould, while the latter was a rather mean-spirited serial about a dishonest, amoral space adventurer.

I think including this mixture of one-off and recurring features from the magazine may have been chosen with the perspective of potentially developing future sequels.  After all, new episodes of those same long-running serials could be included to provide a sense of continuity with future projects, while there would still be plenty of scope to experiment with new stories.

Overall, given the movie is based on a magazine that was specifically known for its often exceptional art, I was surprised and disappointed by the art and animation of this production.  It is often quite poor.  For instance, the framing story segments have crude art with an inconsistent portrayal of perspective is unconvincing.

I get the feeling they spent more on the film's music than its visuals: the soundtrack features a lot of notable 70s performers, often from the progressive rock and heavy metal genres.  Songs on the film include offerings from Sammy Hagar, Devo, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Black Sabbath and Stevie Nicks.

The resulting soundtrack is pretty good, but the cool tunes don't make up for the disappointing visuals and they certainly don't disguise the mediocre quality of the script: most of the stories come across as a bit juvenile, to be frank, often to a large extent because of their efforts to be 'grown up' and 'edgy' by including lots of sex and violence.

This story-telling shortfall is perhaps best exemplified by the segment involving a bomber crew in World War 2.  This sequence starts quite promisingly, with a real sense of menace, but then it just seems to give up on that and segues into another, rather comic skit that also doesn't go anywhere and exists just to offer up a few smutty jokes and stoner gags.

Despite typically mediocre art and lots of gratuitous nudity the Den segment is probably the most enjoyable part of the film. At least Den is a proactive and relatively decent person, making him something of an exception to the leading characters in most segments of the movie.