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.

4 comments:

rio blanco racing said...

almost a perfect movie, but i may have been high when i saw this.
18

Shane said...

Barry's right. The comment's have changed.

rio blanco racing said...

no really i loved how the evil green globe corrupted the most uncorruptable until the little girl makes "the ultimate sacrifice" come on you love christ figures. this is the new testament with tits.

Shane said...

Wow.