Begun in late 1974 primarily as a showcase for French comic book artists Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) and Philippe Druillet, Métal Hurlant suggested an attempt to channel the spirit of the legendary EC Comics. Named for the still-nascent musical genre, the comics anthology shared with heavy metal an aesthetic rooted in pulp, and soon National Lampoon reprinted the publication in English to capitalize on its cutting-edge art and appeal to metal fans. All that remained was the inevitable film adaptation.
Anthologizing some of the comic’s serialized stories, 1981’s Heavy Metal runs through a hodgepodge of genre clichés. A cynical cab driver stumbles his way through a dystopian vision of New York City, narrating his increasingly fraught tasks like a noir gumshoe; a geeky teenager finds an orb that transports him into an ancient world where he’s transformed into a barbaric, Conan-esque warrior; and a World War II bomber pilot finds himself sharing a plane with his zombified crewmates.
Everything looks like it could have been lifted from an Iron Maiden or Manowar album cover. Swords and guns rip apart muscled bodies in gory splashes of blood, and the characters’ anatomical proportions are such that you imagine at least the women incurring irreparable spinal damage in real life. This is nakedly masturbatory material for teen boys who were becoming obsessed with the vanguard of metal’s increasingly aggressive, fantastical nature.
Because multiple animation houses were contracted to reduce Heavy Metal’s production time, there’s a wild disconnect between segments in terms of style and detail, and it’s obvious that the film’s visual component is of secondary importance to the soundtrack. From the power pop of Cheap Trick to the grinding stomp of Blue Öyster Cult, the music selections here demonstrate above all else how the metal genre was still figuring out its identity.
When it clicks—namely in the segment depicting a war between a city of peaceful scholars and mutant barbarians, all set to the charging riff and soaring vocals of Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules”—Heavy Metal attains a goofy sense of fun. It’s Fantasia for heshers, replacing the strains of Beethoven and Stravinsky for the heavy rock of Journey and Grand Funk Railroad, and maybe the closest embodiment we have to a resolutely straight form of camp.
Just as Fantasia 2000 emerged at the dawn of a new century to serve a weak facsimile of its predecessor, so did Heavy Metal 2000. Swapping out the anthology format for a single unified narrative, the film suffers from being unable to pad out ideas that barely sustained a single segment of Heavy Metal into feature length. Much worse, though, is how badly the swords-and-sci-fi format of the comics clashes with the downtuned, simplistic guitar riffs and grunt, semi-rapped vocals that came to define metal at the turn of the millennium.
There’s no way to square the same imagery of buxom, loincloth-clad women and spacefaring pirates with the nu-metal grind of Insane Clown Posse, System of a Down, and Pantera. The first Heavy Metal was also made on the cheap but had a unity of form and function. Everything here is disconnected and enervating, scuttling the winsome absurdity of the premise.
Image/Sound
Given how many animators worked on it, Heavy Metal inevitably suffers from visible differences in quality from segment to segment. That makes the clarity and depth of Sony’s 4K UHD all the more startling. Never before has the film looked this sharp, with the transfer improving the look of the film grain and boosting the colors of everything from psychedelic skies and the radiant green MacGuffin orb that provides the framing device for Heavy Metal.
The main draw of this release, though, is the new Dolby Atmos mix. Heavy metal’s overriding sonic impulse is “loud,” and hearing distorted riffs and pummeling kick-drum fills enveloping you brings an added element of fist-pumping energy to the experience of watching the film. Even so, the sound effects and dialogue are never drowned out by the music.
Heavy Metal 2000 comes only on a standard Blu-ray, though this does mark the film’s high-def debut on home video. The Blu-ray’s transfer is strong, maxing out colors and offering the first lossless audio track that the film has enjoyed on video. The 5.1 surround mix is balanced in all channels to keep dialogue clear while amping up the music.
Extras
The UHD disc containing Heavy Metal comes with a 10-minute featurette called “A Look Back,” which interweaves production tidbits divulged by Ivan Reitman with gushing from the likes of Kevin Smith and Norman Reedus. The accompanying Blu-ray contains an un-retouched copy of the original film’s rough cut, along with some superfluous deleted scenes.
Overall
A cult film receives a sterling A/V transfer from Sony, while its miscalculation of a sequel makes its high-def debut on home video.
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