I just saw Heavy Metal. I am beginning to wonder if I missed some really important plot bits. So, can someone summarize the plot, and little bits of detail such as what happened and when did it happen to the Loch-Nar?
Don’t ask for much, do you?
You didn’t miss anything. It really is that disjointed (if you’ll pardon the expression). The movie is a series of little vignettes, most of which I presume are visions that the Loch-Nar is inflicting on the girl in the beginning. Somewhere, sometime (presumably in the distant future) the Loch-Nar is destroyed by a nearly nude chick with silver hair.
Try thinking of it as a really long music video and you’ll be on the right track. I’m told that being monumentally drunk and/or stoned also helps, but I don’t really recommend it–the show is trippy enough as it is.
I’m sorry, Robert. The SDMB doesn’t allow me to condone the massive consumption of controlled substances, or I’d be able to tell you how you might be able to make sense out of Heavy Metal.
Sure, easy:
“Dude, wouldn’t it kick ass if somebody made a movie that was, like, a cartoon, except that it was all gory and had naked chicks in it and shit?”
“Dude! That’d fuckin’ rock! You could, like, get Sabbath to do the soundtrack! That’d be the coolest movie ever! Pass the bong.”
Ta-da! For bonus points, I’ll explain Heavy Metal 2000:
Exactly the same, except no Sabbath.
Refer yourself to the magazine, once you grasp that learn French and find copies of “Metal Hurlant” in the original language.
Find some of the side work published by Mobius and other artist. As a film interpretation of a magazine the original Heavy Metal is perfect. But that proviso has to be there. As a stand alon piece it isn’t much of a film, other than as kitsche.
I think that the film was a series of vignettes taken from the magazine. The producers decided that they needed something to tie all of the vignettes together, so they used the old “storyteller” trick.
What bothers me is that the Loc Nar supposedly could see the future (since it was showing it). If that’s so, then why did it tell its story when it must have known that telling it would be its doom? And (since I worked on the Space Shuttle program when the film came out) it irked me a bit that the Shuttle had bomb bay doors.
I liked the film, but I thought the Loc Nar bit tying the pieces together didn’t work as well as the producers thought.
It’s French? Ah, the veil has been lifted. Is there more horrible cartoon sex in the sequal?
Yes, plus horrible cartoon acting.
This movie ran for years at the midnight movie (do they still HAVE a midnight movie?). I never went to see it because I would have had to go see it with my stoner friends. When I finally saw it, I thought, well, it’s not bad, but it ain’t all that.
It was eventually replaced by Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That one, I liked for some bizarre reason.
It should be noted that most of the segments (So Beautiful and So Dangerous, particularly) were rather better in their magazine appearances than in their movie adaptations. On the other hand, others (Den) were rather better in the movie.
FAKK 2 (I refuse to refer to it as HM2000) was a Julie Strain movie that really only got the Heavy Metal name because Ms Strain is married to HM’s current editor, Kevin Eastman. (Yeah, the Ninja Turtle guy.)
And, dragging this somewhat off topic: the magazine is rather more uneven under Eastman than it used to be, IMO - used to be of a fairly even good quality, with occasional spots of utter brilliance and the odd dog dropping. Now it seems to have dropped the middleground, and varies from issue to issue which of the extremes dominates. (Again, IMO, of course.)
Heavy Metal cannot be explained, it simply is. It’s trippy, goofy, and stunningly animated. There just isn’t anything more to get than that.
The sequel on the other hand is awful, awful, awful, awful. One “story” which was stunningly bad. It played more like a mixture of bad anime than the goofy, chaotic fun of the original. The animation was even incredibly bad. After the film was finished it languished in a film vault for close to two years because no one would want to distribute it. When it finally did get picked up by someone it was one the Stars/Encore cable premium channels and they didn’t even put it on their main one, instead dumping it onto the Action channel.
If you’ve seen the original movie you might want to check out the DVD which has both the original framing device (a carosel) as part of the pencil test for the movie and a segment that was cut for time which I happen to think would have been the best segment in the movie.
Both the movie and the magazine always bugged me --I had the feeling that I was coming in on the middle of a story that started a long time earlier and ended long after I stopped reading/watching it. The problem is that is really is that shallow and disjointed, so just ignore the lack of logic and the inconsistencies, turn off your brain, and watch the over-endowed chicks.
Incidentally, the segment “Den” had been done several years earlier by Corben as a monochrome animated short under the name Neverwhen. I don’t know if it’s available on video or DVD, but it’s worth looking up, and comparing with the version in Heavy Metal.
During the 70’s and 80’s the magazine would just take you into other bizarre worlds and explore them, while throwing in hefty amounts of eroticism. Its big appeal, to me at least, was the balance of serials and one-shots.
There was a long series about Axle and Musky, the heroic space explorer and his young wisecracking sidekick. That’s the way it looked on the surface, at least, like a boy-scout story with space ships and laser guns. But it got so twisted the squeaky-cleanness of it all got mired in some scary depravity. For instance, the two meet God so that Axle can pay him to create his perfect love. But God is a drunken partying lout with vomit stains on his tunic and can’t remember how to do the Creation process properly anymore and winds up creating a monstrous mass of limbs and tongues. Then Axle finds out his sidekick is actually a girl and has to deal with her puberty setting in. Eventually, they come to Earth to find his perfect love, and it turns out she’s an actress, but the studio she works at had all their sets somehow becaome real. Thus, a movie about WWII had their Hitler actually become the real thing, where they reenacted the Holocaust while actors portraying Indians attacked white people and an actor portraying a serial killer ran around slaughtering women. In the meantime, the cast of a movie about the Crusades took Hitler’s holy cause for themselves and imprisoned him for heresay.
That sort of thing is hard to squeeze into a 90 minute movie. I guess you just had to be there.
See, there’s this guy, and he… hey, don’t bogart it, dude!
What was I saying?
b.