Heavy/Lite:
Heavy Metal
Heavy Metal 2000 |
DIRECTOR
Gerald Potterton
SCREENWRITERS
Len Blum
Dan Goldberg
based
on stories by
Richard Corben
Juan Giménez
Angus McKie
Dan O'Bannon
Thomas Warkentin
Bernie Wrightson
PRODUCER
Ivan Reitman
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Brian Tufano
MUSIC
Elmer Bernstein
EDITORS
Janice Brown
Mick Manning
Gerald Tripp
CAST (VOICES)
Rodger Bumpass (Hanover Fiste)
Jackie Burroughs (Katherine)
John Candy (Dan/Den/Robot)
Joe Flaherty (Lawyer/General)
Don Francks (Grimaldi)
Douglas Kenney (Regolian)
Eugene Levy (Sternn)
Harold Ramis (Zeke)
Richard Romanus (Harry Canyon)
John Vernon (Prosecutor)
Al Waxman (Rudnick)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 90m
U.S. release: August 7, 1981
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
site
DIRECTORS
Michael Coldewey
Michel Lemire
SCREENWRITER
Robert Payne Cabeen
based
on the graphic novel
The Melting Pot by
Simon Bisley
Kevin Eastman
Eric Talbot
PRODUCER
Michel Lemire
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Bruno Philip
MUSIC
Frederic Talgorn
EDITOR
Brigitte Breault
CAST (VOICES)
Michael Ironside (Tyler)
Julie Strain Eastman (Julie)
Billy Idol (Odin)
Pier Kohl (Germain St. Germain)
Sonja Ball (Kerrie)
Brady Moffatt (Lambert)
Rick Jones (Zeek)
Arthur Holden (Dr. Schechter)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 88m
U.S. release: July 10, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
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When Heavy Metal was
released in 1981, no less an entity than Variety called
it a "classy anthology." Anthology, yes; classy, no.
I seriously doubt that any of the movie's many fans (of which
I am one) would confuse its adolescent, retro charm with class.
To understand that, maybe you'd need a brief course in Heavy
Metal 101. The magazine Heavy Metal, first published
in 1977 by the same house that gave you National Lampoon,
was an Americanized version of the French comics magazine Metal
Hurlant. The American version did publish international artists
(often in amusingly awkward translations), some of whom, like
Moebius and Guido Crepax, really did aspire to and achieve Heavy
Metal's stated goal of "adult fantasy." However,
the magazine also devoted itself more and more to routine adventure
stories with T&A and gore; some of the stuff was like a softcore
version of Conan or your choice of Marvel comic.
Not surprisingly, the major-motion-picture version of Heavy
Metal -- produced by Ivan Reitman and written by Len Blum
and Dan Goldberg, featuring voices by Harold Ramis, John Candy,
and Joe Flaherty (all five of whom had a hit that same summer
with Stripes) -- is an unabashed crowd-pleaser. Whenever
possible, it goes for the fight scene, the sex joke, the jiggly
breasts, and, in one case, drug humor (in the form of two aliens
who snort up ropelike lines of cocaine, like an extraterrestrial
Cheech & Chong). The movie's secret, I think -- what makes
it so beloved, instead of a largely forgotten failure like its
contemporaries Rock and Rule or Fire and Ice (though
those movies have their fans) -- is that it generally doesn't
take itself very seriously; essentially, it's a comedy. It presents
the standard adolescent power fantasies, but with a nudge and
a wink.
Take "Den," for instance. As originally conceived by
Richard Corben, it was more or less a straight Conan rip-off.
Adapted for the movie, it becomes a two-tiered satire in which
Dan, a dorky teenager (voiced by John Candy), gets magically
whisked away to another dimension, where he finds himself made
over into a beefy bald warrior named Den, great in battle and
even better in the sack. Though Candy also does Den's gruff voice
("Where is the girl?", etc.), he continues to do Dan's
dorky voice in narration, sounding goggle-eyed in awe over his
excellent adventure. Den's chief adversary is an obvious swishy
stereotype, your usual decadent king who has a buxom queen but
probably doesn't look at her very often (which is why she falls
so readily into bed with Den, one assumes); but he's also been
given an amusing New York inflection in which, say, "die"
becomes "doy" -- "She doys, you doy, everybody
doys." Odd little touches like that connect this world with
that of Ralph Bakshi.
Bakshi's influence can also be felt in "Harry Canyon,"
the movie's first story, prepared by scripters Blum and Goldberg
for the film -- it's one of three tales not derived from anything
that appeared in the magazine. That's not to say it isn't derivative,
though; it's a clearcut film noir homage, complete with
hard-boiled narration by the eponymous taxi-driving hero (voiced
by Richard Romanus, who did a lot of work for Bakshi's urban
toons), an obese gangster who wants something the hero has, a
femme fatale -- what we have here is a cyberpunk remix of The
Maltese Falcon.
The McGuffin here, though, is a mysterious glowing green ball
that figures in all the segments, representing the undying force
of evil. The ball (called the Loc-Nar in "Den" and
"Harry Canyon") seems to corrupt or destroy anyone
who comes into contact with it; the ball, in fact, is telling
the stories we're watching. The movie begins with an astronaut
coming down to Earth in a white convertible (this is unquestionably
one of the coolest opening scenes in film history); the astronaut
enters a house and greets a little girl, showing her a green
ball he's brought back for her. The ball, expectedly, disintegrates
the poor astronaut and backs the terrified girl up against a
wall, gloating over how powerful it is, and we occasionally return
to the house so that the ball can gloat some more and set up
another story.
The ball, and the evil it embodies, seem to have the least to
do with the penultimate segment, "So Beautiful, So Dangerous,"
based on an Angus McKie story. This is the one with the two doper
aliens, as well as a horny robot and a buxom redhead (there are
no flat chests in the Heavy Metal universe). True to the
artist it's adapting, the segment is entertaining but meandering,
arriving at a stop without actually having arrived at a point
-- it represents the magazine at its most self-indulgent. A much
tighter tale, with perhaps the movie's best animation, is the
preceding segment, Dan O'Bannon's "B-17." In 1981,
Creepshow had not yet come out, so "B-17" was
the first time in years that movie audiences got a taste of the
ghastly EC Comics of the '50s. When you watch this segment, which
is chillingly well done (it concerns a bomber full of dead airmen
who become zombies), you may laugh and realize that the movie's
creators are determined to take us through the history of disreputable
pulp comics -- or as much as they can in 90 minutes. Given Dan
O'Bannon's best-known films (Alien, which he wrote, and
Return of the Living Dead, which he wrote and directed),
the segment also functions as a best-of-O'Bannon in miniature.
The ball also doesn't have a lot to do with "Captain Sternn"
(based on a story by comics legend Berni Wrightson), though it
seems to at first. An openly parodic treatment of the typical
big-jawed space-cowboy hero (the titular character looks pretty
noble to us until we hear the long list of charges brought against
him, of which he's apparently guilty as sin), this segment also
benefits from the best timing, comic and otherwise, of any story
in the film. The confident Sternn's dialogue with his worried
lawyer ("The best we can hope for is that you'll get a secret
burial so's they can't defile your body!" "I told you,
Charlie ... I got an angle") has the back-and-forth
rhythm of classic stage comedy (Eugene Levy was the voice of
Sternn, Joe Flaherty is his lawyer), and when Sternn's "star
witness" Hanover Fiste morphs into a psychotic hulk there's
a terrific sequence when he corners Sternn, slamming the walls
on either side of him into tatters as he walks.
The final, longest sequence is "Taarna," which may
be taken as a refutation of the decidedly pre-feminist women
(damsels in distress, whores, bitches, bimbos) who have populated
the rest of the movie. Taarna, a mute warrior, seeks revenge
on the evil hordes (corrupted by the ball, what else?) that decimated
her people. This is the segment that should have been called
"So Beautiful, So Dangerous," but never mind. Being
one of the movie's few characters to be rotoscoped from a live
model (a favorite Bakshi technique), Taarna moves with considerably
more grace than anyone else in the film. The movie seems to genuinely
respect her, and when she's captured and nude, waiting to be
whipped by her nemesis, the scene ends before it can satisfy
any whip devotees in the audience. Ironically, the "Whip
It" boys themselves, Devo, appear in a tavern sequence here,
performing "Through Being Cool." The soundtrack by
itself is worth owning, ranging from the popular (Cheap Trick,
Journey, Blue Oyster Cult) to the obscure (Riggs, Nazareth, Trust).
It's fitting, in a perverse way, that this boy's-club confection
of wanking, winking softcore pulp should end on a dual note of
female empowerment. I think that without "Taarna,"
the movie would seem much shallower; the elegance of the final
sequence restores some balance. "See," the movie is
saying, "women can kick ass too, and do all the stuff you
saw Den doing before." (Significantly, she doesn't have
sex. It might've been too much to ask in 1981 for the moviemakers
to create a sexual woman who could still kick ass. It's often
still too much to ask.) After all, the movie doesn't climax
with the adolescent power trip "Den" -- it ends with
"Taarna." (And technically it begins with Taarna, too,
if the ending is any indication.) When the movie was released,
there were two ad design concepts floating around: a Corben painting
of the muscles-on-top-of-muscles Den (and his woman kneeling
at his feet), and a triumphant portrait of Taarna riding her
endearing giant bird-creature. Guess which design was adopted
for the soundtrack cover, the re-release poster art, and the
home-video cover art. Similar artwork adorns the video and DVD
cover art for Heavy Metal 2000, but don't be fooled.
If the
Heavy Metal movies offer any message for mankind, it's
that anything green and glowing can't be good. In the insipid
Heavy Metal 2000, the embodiment of evil is not a green,
glowing ball but a green, glowing crystal -- a key to
immortalizing waters. Slight catch: If you touch this key, you
go insane. Thus, an ordinary space pilot named Tyler (voiced
by Michael Ironside) gets his meathooks on the key and suddenly
becomes rabidly homicidal (he also suddenly gets fangs and a
mane of black hair). This is not unlike what happened to the
ordinary townspeople of "Taarna" when they were engulfed
by green glowing lava and became evil. The rest of Heavy Metal
2000 is not unlike "Taarna," either. Indeed, it's
more or less an 88-minute rehash of that story, without the original's
brevity or grandeur.
Tyler commandeers a spacecraft and lays waste to a place called
Eden, where people don't age as quickly. One person who survives
the massacre is Julie, a strapping six-footer much like the B-movie
actress who voices her, Julie Strain. Tyler has killed her father
and kidnapped her sister, so Julie goes into vengeful overdrive
along with a goofball pilot, a little guy made of stone, and
a mysterious mentor named Odin (voice by Billy Idol). As a spiritual
sister to Taarna, Julie looks the part, but Taarna didn't speak;
unfortunately, Julie does.
Julie Strain, whose comic-book-mogul
husband Kevin Eastman shaped this movie for her (he co-created
the graphic novel The Melting Pot on which it's loosely
based), seems like a nice enough person, but she's not a natural
actress under the best of circumstances. In the clips I've seen,
her line delivery is weirdly flat and amateurish, like the delivery
of the most conscientious untalented student in acting class;
what saves her is her presence -- she really is six-foot-one
-- and her vibrant off-camera personality, which peeks through
the empty posturing she usually has to do. As just a voice, though,
Strain is, well, strained. Not that even the best actress could
do much with Robert Payne Cabeen's script, heavy on dialogue
like "Don't talk, don't touch, don't move, don't breathe
-- or I'll kill you!"
The original Heavy Metal's animation may look crude to
some viewers today, but at least it was alive and kicking; it
owed its inspiration to Ralph Bakshi more than anyone. Heavy
Metal 2000's character design takes a page from the bland
humanoids who populate some of the weaker Disney/Don Bluth/DreamWorks
toons. (There were very few human characters in the original
Heavy Metal who looked like they would've belonged anywhere
near a Disney film.) The filmmakers were reportedly concerned
about avoiding a "Saturday-morning-cartoon" look, but
that's pretty much what they ended up with. As if to offset this,
the directors (Michel Lemire and Michael Coldewey, both of whom
would do well to leave this off their resumés) stuff backgrounds
and incidental scenes with computer-animated spaceships, debris,
and so on. The film should be seen by animation students as a
textbook example of how not to integrate computer animation
with old-school cel animation.
The story is old-school, too. Did Kevin Eastman not realize that
the core audience for this film would have seen, and remembered
with pleasure, the original movie's final segment? Eastman, the
'80s precursor to Todd McFarlane (he and Peter Laird created
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which made them millionaires),
has said that he wanted to tell a story with a strong heroine
-- as if TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, and
La Femme Nikita hadn't been doing that for years; as if
"Taarna" hadn't done it 19 years ago. Here he falls
back on the usual fanboy idea of strong womanhood -- the scowling
bitch-babe with tits out to here. Taarna was that, too, to a
certain extent, but the original Heavy Metal was a joking
compendium of fanboy fantasies, and Taarna was a definite advance
in 1981. Julie is a step back, at certain points disrobing so
gratuitously that I was put in the odd position of feeling offended
on behalf of an animated character.
Michael Ironside and Billy Idol have fun hamming it up, and there's
one funny moment when a robot sex doll activates itself and goes
to town on Julie's hapless pilot sidekick during a space battle.
But overall, this is a joyless trudge through decades-old clichés,
with about twenty gallons more gore than in the original (the
MPAA must be more lenient towards animated bloodshed; the same
violence, if done as live-action, would not have slipped by with
an R rating). Even musically, Heavy Metal 2000 can't touch
its predecessor, which found room for the calming Donald Fagen
and Stevie Nicks as well as the pumping Black Sabbath and Sammy
Hagar; this movie's soundtrack is almost all grinding techno-thrash
gibberish -- I call it music to be constipated to -- and it heightens
the project's general cheesiness. This is the sort of movie in
which the evil Tyler pulls out one of his loose incisors and
you know, absolutely know, that in later shots he won't
be missing any teeth. The movie is pretty toothless itself; it
gums its story like the pablum it is.
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