Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal (1981)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: Many people

Starring: Quite a few famous names, including some that were on SCTV at the time

From: Columbia

Maybe if I was a 14 year old boy in 1981...

This is one of a huge collection known as “Movies that Blair has known of for many years yet has never seen”. I am old enough to remember that there was hype when this finally came out on home video in the mid 90's because the music rights issues that prevented it were finally resolved. Maybe if I had watched it as a teenager in the late 90's my opinion would be higher but as between then and now I've seen only a tiny amount of anime but that's still enough... not to mention 70's adult animation like a few Ralph Bakshi pictures and things from Europe like Fantastic Planet and Son of the White Mare to be less than impressed by this “adult animation” picture.

I've never read anything of the Heavy Metal magazine that this was based on. It's an anthology thing centered around a talking green orb that humblebrags the impact it has had in various locations, where the substories are then told. Besides the framing device ending in a baffling way, the other tales are mostly juvenile efforts that seem mostly designed to revel in foul language, bloody violence, and (especially) sex & violence. There are many topless cartoon ladies the viewer gets to see-personally, in 2022 it is so easy to see boobs, whether real or drawn... just the aspect of this having boobs won't enthrall me. Heck, I am sure that anime and even, ahem, hentai, has more impressive sex scenes if you get your jollies from that.

The animation looking rough by modern standards is really the least of its problems. It's that I did not care about the majority of the stories present-the only two interesting ones were Den (even though it's one of the “horny stories”) and B-17 which is a World War II tale that has nothing to do with sex. I don't know why Ivan Reitman was involved with the production but that allowed for some famous SCTV people to provide their voices, such as Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, and John Candy... not to mention other well-known names like Richard Romanus, John Vernon, and August Schellenberg. Not even them nor the rock soundtrack could make me love Heavy Metal. It's not always their best tunes but it was still nice to hear the soundtrack—even if there's only a bit of heavy metal it's still rad to hear such acts like Ronnie James Dio era Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Stevie Nicks, Journey, Don Felder, Devo, Sammy Hagar, Nazareth, & Blue Oyster Cult, among others.

Many like this more than me so at least it has been easy to track down for a long while now. If nothing else, I have the inspiration to see more adult animated pictures later in '22.