Ever since I stumbled across that trailer Thursday, I’ve had the movie Heavy Metal on the brain. Not an entirely unpleasant situation, but definitely a little outside my usual obsessions…

Anyway, I tried talking about it to a few of my friends at work and found, much to my surprise, that this movie doesn’t seem to be very well remembered. I didn’t expect the kids in the office to know about it, but even the older guys could only scratch their heads and say they think they saw it and they kind of remember it, but not really. And here I’ve believed all these years that it was a minor touchstone for my generation, not on the level of Star Wars or even Tron, but at least equivalent to Caddyshack. Once again, however, I seem to find myself the Lone Keeper of Obsolete Pop Culture.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised in the case of Heavy Metal. It’s not exactly a great classic, even by “cult classic” standards.

If you haven’t seen it — and judging from the ignorance of my coworkers, I feel safe in assuming that most of you probably have not — the movie is an anthology of stories loosely connected by a framing device involving a glowing green orb that is supposedly the embodiment of all the evil in the universe. Each story is drawn and animated in a different style, ranging from fairly realistic in the case of the “Harry Canyon” segment to the stylized and cartoonish “Captain Sterrn.” The subject matter of the stories — like those in the magazine that inspired the film — covers the gamut of sci-fi and fantasy sub-genres: dystopia, space opera, sword and sorcery, horror. Stir into that mix a generous helping of gore, nudity — well, cartoon nudity — and juvenile sex-and-drugs-based humor that appeals strongly to horny adolescent boys but is a tougher sell to women and grown-ups, and the end result is, as I mentioned yesterday, a disjointed mess of a movie that is maybe half good at best.

But in many ways, it’s a glorious mess. The half that’s good is supremely entertaining, in a boneheaded, Beavis and Butthead — or maybe Bill and Ted — kind of way. The half that’s not so great at least has the fact that you’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.* And I can’t think of any other movies that so perfectly crystallized the anti-disco, black-light-and-velvet-poster aspect of the late ’70s. Watching Heavy Metal now is to remember the time you snuck into your cool older cousin’s bedroom or got left alone in your biker uncle’s rumpus room for a few minutes, and you took advantage of the time to check out all his stuff that seemed so seductively dangerous at the time: that Molly Hatchet record with wicked cover, the curtain made of old-fashioned beer-can pull tabs, the inscrutable posters on the walls, the Bruce Lee-inspired nunchuku slung over a nail, the macabre Aurora models on the shelf, and maybe — if you were lucky — a nudie magazine sticking out from under the chair, providing just enough of a peek to make you feel like you’d been really transgressive.
What? You never had a cool older cousin or uncle that was into all that spooky, grown-up stuff? That’s a shame…
Anyhow, I did some poking around on YouTube and managed to find two of my favorite bits from the movie. The first is the opening sequence, which begins the frame story about the evil green rock:

The sequence is ridiculous in all kinds of ways — atmospheric re-entry in a Corvette? With the top down, no less? Let me know how that works for you… — and from a technical perspective, the animation is pretty rough, especially the bit where the car actually hits the ground. But this pushes a lot of buttons for me… the car, the space shuttle… and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn this sequence inspired MTV’s original astronaut logo, which had a similar jerky kind of quality. And, of course, a guy in a spacesuit.
Moving on, here is the creepiest segment from Heavy Metal (this would be the horror entry I mentioned earlier) in its entirety:

Again, ridiculous on a lot of levels — B-17s weren’t even used much in the Pacific, and trust me, they weren’t nearly as roomy inside as depicted here — but effective nevertheless, and very reminiscent of the classic horror comics that predated and most likely informed the Heavy Metal magazine. Oh, and one little trivia note: this segment was written by Dan O’Bannon, the man who wrote the original ALIEN film.

And on that note, I’m off to try and accomplish something with my Saturday…

(Yeah, sure… you all know I’m going to go dig out my old VHS copy of Heavy Metal and spend a couple of hours reliving puberty, don’t you? But hey, I’ve got to at least pretend I’m a responsible grown-up now, don’t I?)

* Well, except for The Fifth Element, which copies a lot of the look and feel of Heavy Metal to create a marvelously entertaining live-action cartoon…