Heavy Metal - 1981

Here's a movie I totally fucking forgot about.  I saw this movie back when I was a young dude, shortly after I got introduced to adult-y animated things back in the late 90's.  You know you're cool if you can say "back in the 90's"  just, you know BTW.  FYI.  I ate a weed muffin this morning, so I'm a little impartial right now.

Heavy Metal is an oddball out there.  Every once in a while I'll see a movie like this and I'll wonder, how did they make this in the time frame they did? 1981, it seems like that was not especially a time for adult animated films.  Okay, so there'd been some before, and Ralph Bakshi was at this point "on the map" with his R rated animated films.  But I still am surprised when I see that this is 1981.  It feels way too progressive and crazy for that time.

This was an obvious precursor to the MTV generation, the Beavis and Butthead culture of the 90's.  Heavy Metal feels way more like a product of the 90's counter-culture destruction people saw as Generation Y.  Heavy Metal was clearly one of those films that is actually really progressive and defining, and I didn't realize that when I was a kid.  Watching it again was a pretty eye opening experience.

I haven't reviewed any animated films on this blog yet, and that's cause they are pretty few and far between to find ones that aren't hugely well known.  Of course, Heavy Metal is hugely well known.  The film is a cult classic, an adult animated but super fun action packed comedy with both offensive and childish humor.  It's the type of film they don't make anymore, something that's rated R but still appeals to kids, like how they used to make R rated movie toys for kids.

The movie itself is a series of short subjects.  They more or less revolve around a glowing green ball which has the power to vaporize people who touch it.  Sometimes, though, the ball will instead influence a person directly or indirectly, and give them power.  8 different stories are presented, in different lengths in the film.  I'm not really going to do a complete breakdown at all, but generally some are pretty cool, and some are just small ideas that don't seem to be much of anything.

There's not a too lot of other things like this, and given that it's hard to market an adult oriented animated film, I'm not that surprised.  However, there should be more of these.  They're really cool, and so interesting to watch.  They're definitely more for younger adults than me, this is perfect for the time when I originally saw it, 16 or so.  But at that age you get lost in the killer soundtrack, animated violence and nudity, you don't really pay attention to the plots  (or I at least didn't).

It seems it should have a bigger following these days, but then again there's far too many other things for this to be like, shown at the local indie theater and all.  But it's great and deserves 4 stars.