I’m watching Heavy Metal (1981). I read Heavy Metal in the '80s and '90s, so I have a fondness for the film. Also it has a great soundtrack.
Admittedly, the Grimaldi story that is supposed to tie everything together is weak. I mean, the Green Orb tells its story to the little girl, and in telling, it seeds its own demise. Aside from that, and despite negative reviews, I liked itl. The segemts are true to the magazine, and I enjoyed the stories, Did I mention the great soundtrack?
Totally worth it just for the B-17 part. And maybe a couple other things… Yeah, great soundtrack!
The individual segmets are great. Just the Grimaldi tie-in was weak.
Dissenting opinion: I thought it was weak. Many of the stories never really ended. Nor did they seem to have a point, other than looking cool. I was all rooting for the Taarna to kick ass, and she Worfed her one task.
I wanted to like it, but I was underwhelmed. It did have the same feel as the magazine, which is good. But it seems more a gratuitous wankfest movie more than a movie with a plot.
The last date I had with one girl that just wasn’t working out was taking her to this film, and telling her it was one of my favorites. I guess it was good for something.
I like the soundtrack, but I like BOC’s Fire of Unknown Origin as the unofficial soundtrack.
I have fond memories of going to see this as a midnight show with my high school buddies in the '90s. I rewatched it once and it didn’t really hold up; the individual vignettes were mostly silly. Eugene Levy and John Candy are great, though.
I remember watching this many times as a teenager, with my boyfriend, his brother, and some of their friends. It was a little awkward at times. I remember once, after a particularly interesting scene, one of the boys breathed, “Man, whoever made this movie could really draw.” We got a good laugh out of that.
I’ll second this. A lot of the segments don’t really have coherent stories, and meander around, or the plots make little or no sense.
I felt pretty much the same way about the magazine. The emphasis, as with the film, was on bizarre and science fictiony images, usually with a heavy dose of sex. I always felt that I was stepping in on the middle of a story that had been going on for a long time, and was completely unfamiliar with, and that while I waas watching or reading it, it turned into something else.
I have to carve out an exception for Richard Corben’s work in the magazine, which had absolutely gorgeous artwork and coherent beginning ng-middle-end stories. The "Den’ segment in the movie approximates Corben’s work, although they didn’t have the budget or time to duplicate his artwork, and the story was so trimmed that one reviewer characterized it as “being inside the mind of a wildly masturbating teenager” – which doesn’t describe Corben’s magazine work well at all.
(Incidentally, a sort of proto-Den , animated on a shoestring budget by Corben, had already appeared as a short film in 1968 called Neverwhere. You can see it on YouTube:
)
One of my favorites, and a number of the songs are still in my regular listening rotation.
I bought the Blu-ray and watched it for the first time a couple years ago.
I turned it off after about 45 minutes. I tried, but just couldn’t get in to it. Perhaps it was because I’m not a big fan of anime or fantasy films. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t in a chemically-altered state. 
I just know it bored me.
I loved it when it came out. You don’t have to be in a chemically-altered state. But it helps a lot if you are a rutting male teenager.
“You die, she dies, everybody dies.”
It’s been more than 20 years since I’ve seen it but I enjoyed it. The B-17 sequence alone was worth the price of admission. I didn’t see it until I was a teenager in the 1990s, and it was just so much different from the other animated movies I had seen. At least different from the animated movies produced by American studios. It probably didn’t hurt that I was a rutting teenage boy when I first saw it.
‘Oh, Norl… Castrate him.’
‘There was no way I was gonna walk around this place with my dork hanging out!’
‘Good nyborg!’
Visually (and music-wise) I agree. It was the primary one I had heard about, and the one that drew me in. But it has the same problem I was complaining about. Why does the Loc Nar turn the crew into evil zombies? Why does the pilot land on a zombie infested island? What happens to the plane? Why zombies? So the pilot gets eaten by zombies…and?
All I hear is Harrison Ford: Kid, it ain’t that kinda movie!
I prefer the Taarna. It was the closest to a coherent, complete and likeable story. Plus: Bonus hot animated nudity! But she was so inept as a warrior. However, Vengance (The pact) is a great song.
I own it on DVD. I haven’t watched it in a few years. But, I remember loving it. The only other film that remotely compares (IMO of course) is Fire&Ice. While F&I looked great, there was 5 minutes of plot stretched to feature length and the dialogue is wincingly awful.
RE Feeling as though you are dropped in the middle of a story
I actually refer to that as ‘a Heavy Metal’. You’re dropped into the middle of a sci fi or fantasy story. But things are so well written you can pick things up and know what’s going on and have a great time.
I always felt the Captain Stern story had the most cohesive plot of any of the stories.
Heavy Metal (magazine) featured different genres of stories. The Loc Nar was used to ‘tie the stories together’ for the movie – unsuccessfully. I love the movie, but even when I saw it on the big screen back in the day I thought the attempt was stupid.
I don’t remember reading B-17 in the magazine. The story must have had some other thing happen to zombify the crew. But as part of the ‘tying together’ the segments of the film, the Loc Nar was used instead.
The pilot doesn’t intentionally land on a zombie-infested island. His crew is killed and turned into zombies, and he bails out just as the dead crew break into the cockpit. The plane crashes. Why zombies? Why not zombies? You could ask the same thing of The Walking Dead. The pilot does not survive, and becomes a zombie himself on the Island of the Airplane Graveyard (though it wasn’t shown).
Stories in Heavy Metal magazine, Psycho, Weird War Tales, and other comics of that type often leave the stories open-ended. Duh-duh-DUH!!!
The segment B-17 was written by Dan O’Bannon. Interesting guy, O’Bannon. He’s been an actor (Pinback in Dark Star), special effects guy (He did the “Death Star Targeting the Rebel Base” graphics for the original Star Wars in 1977), writer (too many films to list) and director (he claimed to have directed some scenes in Dark Star. John Carpenter disagrees. But he certainly directed the film Return of the Living Dead)
O’Bannon’s practice is to keep doing some trope until he gets it right, then keep on going until he gets it wrong again. Like the “Alien Loose aboard a Star Ship” (Dark Star, Alien). Or, more to the point, Zombies (Dead and Buried, LifeForce, Return of the Living Dead, and, of course, “B-17” in Heavy Metal) He doesn’t need a reason, or even necessarily a plot – just the idea of zombies and some interesting imagery.
Of course, this is my complaint about the film as a whole. I’d like to see some rhyme and reason with the sex, gore, and rock and roll.
Big meh from me for Heavy Metal. I’m big fan of the music, but the animations and stories didn’t do anything for me. I’d rather watch Fantasia.
Was that Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed parked there?
Anyway, there’s open ended and then there’s “We don’t have an ending”. IMO, the HM film was more the latter and less the former. Though to be fair, the Taarna had a real ending.
I’ve watched this over the years, in different states, and I’m glad I’m not the only one that was WTF. It always felt to me to be unfinished and missing something.