HEAVY METAL - DVD review

Heavy metal describes more than loud, aggressive rock played by people in funny costumes. It's a culture, a lifestyle, a language, an art form, and, of course, a magazine.

The 1981 movie "Heavy Metal" is an animated version of the comic book, featuring a variety of stories and visual techniques, the voices of several famous people, and a whole bevy of heavy metal and presumably ordinary metal rock bands. While it may seem pretty dated today, except to devotees of the magazine and the music, there are still a few sequences to enjoy. Depending on the viewer's age, the film may be hip, heavy, nostalgic, historical, or hysterical.

The "Heavy Metal" comic book describes itself as an "adult illustrated fantasy magazine." That may be so, but its hefty doses of big-bosomed women, muscular men, and far-out gore surely feed adolescent fantasies. The film attempts to capture the comic-book's tone in its animations, its sci-fi imaginativeness, its comedy, its violence, its profanity, its nudity, and its sex. Be prepared in the film's eight short tales for plenty of everything the magazine had in mind. No one is likely to mistake this movie for a Disney release. Take the first sequence, for instance. The year is 2031, and a cab driver named Harry Canyon saves a damsel in distress from thugs pursuing her and a mysterious green ball known as the Loc Nar. Harry takes her back to his apartment where she immediately disrobes and jumps into his bed. This episode, with its jet-propelled taxis, hover crafts, and seedy locations was clearly the inspiration for Bruce Willis's live-action film, "The Fifth Element."

Most of the various segments feature loser males achieving phenomenal and unaccountable success with beautiful, buxom young females; as the producers admit, the stories are primarily male fantasies. The miscellaneous tales are held loosely together by the green ball, which passes from hand to hand and corrupts all who possess it.

Each story is done in a slightly different animation style, yet each section is reminiscent of the "Heavy Metal" manner. To illustrate the point, Columbia TriStar have included on the disc a gallery of "Heavy Metal" magazine covers dating from the mid seventies, when the magazine began its run in America, to the present day. The most visually attractive of all the sequences is one toward the end that has its main character flying through a city (or factory; it isn't clear) that appears to be made up of a series of pipes and ducts. It is beautiful, fanciful, three dimensional, and often breathtaking. Would that there was more story to go with it.

Among the prominent artists and designers involved with the project were Richard Corben, Berni Wrightson, Mike Ploog, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Angus McKie, Chris Achilleaos, and Juan Gimenez. Artist Frank Frazetta may not have been physically present but his spirit infuses most of the work, as does the ghost of fifties E.C.comic books.

That the film's divergent styles are blended as well as they are may be attributed to executive producer Len Mogel, producer Ivan Rietman, and director Gerald Potterton. Story ideas were provided by Richard Corben, Angus McKie, Dan O'Bannon, and Thomas Warkentin. Dan Goldberg and Len Blum put the script together. Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Devo, Grand Funk Railroad, Sammy Hagar, Stevie Nicks, Journey, Donald Fagen, Don Felder, Nazareth, Riggs, and Trust provide the bulk of the music, which goes by largely unnoticed, with Elmer Bernstein and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra picking up the loose ends. John Candy, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, John Vernon, and others supply the voices.

Video:
The movie's widescreen 1.74:1 format does a good job conveying most of its theatrical image. After some initial problems with grain and age flecks, the picture quality settles into what is a respectably clean appearance. Naturally, with an anthology like this, utilizing a diversity of techniques, the colors are not uniformly bright or vivid, nor are they meant to be.

Audio:
The audio choices are Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Surround. In the former mode, the remixed soundtrack is quite effective in establishing directionality among the assorted sonic effects, although music is limited mainly to the front channels with relatively subtle ambiance enhancement in the rear.

Extras:
Columbia TriStar provide a worthy assortment of bonus goodies to augment one's enjoyment of the feature film. In fact, in many instances they are even more enjoyable than the feature film. I was especially fascinated by the above-mentioned gallery of "Heavy Metal" cover art, some of it among the finest illustrations ever created for public consumption. There is also a full-length rough cut of the film (very rough, indeed) that can be viewed with or without a running commentary. A few, brief deleted scenes are included, the most interesting being a merry-go-round motif first adopted as a framework for telling the miscellaneous stories and later dropped in favor of the green ball device. I'd have voted for the carousel. Then there is a thirty-five minute documentary, "Imagining Heavy Metal," additional production notes, lots of single-cel and layered-cel animation reproductions, and sundry other behind-the-scenes angles introduced, plus a reading by Carl Macek of his book "Heavy Metal: The Movie" that may be played to accompany the feature. Add the usual assortment of subtitles and scene selections and you come up with undoubtedly good value for the dollar. Provided you like the main feature.

Parting Shots:
For the all the effort that went into this movie, it should have been better. Only the disc's bonus materials boost its entertainment value a notch. It is visually stunning some of the time and stunningly juvenile the rest. None of its segments last long enough to be entirely satisfying, and its constant attention to boobs and buns over subject matter soon becomes more irritating than provocative. OK, you say boobs and buns ARE the subject matter. The movie is sexy, silly, and mindless. If it had paid as much attention to plot and pace as it did to fashion, I might have been happier. Like, less-than-heavy, dude.