Heavy Metal

1981 science fiction cartoon

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A space sphere of throbbing green light disintegrates an astronaut and then tells his daughter a few stories. It rocks pretty hard!

I'm not the audience for this. A white suburban teenager who is angry with his parents for no real reason and who can't wait to bust out of his pants, a guy with a goat's head in his closet and a bunch of missing socks--he's the audience. This is an episodic collection of animated sci-fi shenanigans, definitely a hit 'n' miss affair, but at least half of them contain the imagery you'd expect to see in a fantasy geek's wettest dream. All the cartoon women are gifted mammararily and plot developments give plenty of excuses to allow the nipples to make appearances. There's even a scene with robot-on-human sex if you're into that sort of thing. I know you are which is why I'm mentioning it. I'm not a fan of the music although it was good to hear Devo and even see a really cool alien depiction of them. I liked the weird-looking creatures that inhabited these stories, almost like cast-offs from the Mos Eisley cantina, and I really liked the opening shots of an astronaut driving his hot rod home after a hard day's work. Air Force zombies, a Hulkish figure with the great name of Hanover Fiste, a bit of sci-fi noir with ugly animation to match an ugly Robert Crumb-esque New York, and chunks of the otherwise-dull climactic story featured on the above poster are high points. The stories are animated in slightly different styles which gives it some variety, but after a while, enough's enough. You get frustrated that it doesn't make a lot of sense, and you don't even care about seeing any more animated nudity because you've already shot your wad. So to speak. There's enough here to make a teenage boy say the word badass multiple times by whatever the middle schooler equivalent of a water cooler, so I guess you almost have to look at it as a success.