I’m one of the three people on the planet who actually liked the movie Heavy Metal. Sure, it was flawed; and I hated the Loc Nar bridge between the stories. (‘I am going to tell you how evil I am. This will destroy me in the end. But I’m going to tell you anyway.’) Still, there were parts that endure. I still say, ‘Good nyborg!’ from time to time. And I still enjoy most of the soundtrack.
So I’ve plugged in Heavy Metal 2000 to watch it for the first time. I’m aware that everyone hates this movie more than the first one. So far, Evil Guy is Evil. Tough Bitch is Tough. It looks like they tried to make the movie ‘more’. The artwork is denser than it should be, which is fine for a magazine but a little distracting in a film. There have been two eye-rolling moments. The first is when Tough Bitch and Good Bad Guy are about to dock with a space station. Their ‘docking coordinates’ are A-N-U-S-6-3-7-0. The second is when TB receives her ‘visa file number’: U-R-F-U-K-D-8-8-1. Haw, haw! ‘ANUS’ and ‘URFUKD’! Boy, howdy, thay-at’s sum funny shit! :rolleyes:
The first one is a classic that I’ve watched well over 300 times. I quote the movie a lot, although most people don’t get the references. Yes, it’s as flawed as an issue of the magazine, but that never stopped me from purchasing a copy in any given month.
The second one is seriously flawed in that it serves mainly as a vehicle for and tribute to Julie Strain. While I think the lady is awesome (and beautiful), it’s not really gonna make for a good movie. Gotta have a good story, characters, art, etc. HM2k got some stuff right but got sooo much wrong (the new “Taarna” sequence, only with Ms. Strain, in particular got my goat) that the movie is hard to watch more than once.
ETA: and they totally fucked up the soundtrack on the second film. The first soundtrack was NOT all heavy metal, but they were good songs and most were unique to the soundtrack (i.e. not already-established hits). The second movie, I dunno, they just had someone working on the music angle that was pretty out of touch with the genres and tastes of the magazines demographics, IMO. There’s like 2 good songs on the whole thing.
OK, just finished. I think the main problem with HM2K is that it’s not like the classic version of the magazine. For the first decade or so, HM seemed to have more – and different – stories that were often serials. HM seemed to disappear for a while – or perhaps I just lost track of it – and the issues I bought since then seem to have more ‘miniature graphic novels’. I’d like to read a few pages of a story, and then anticipate the next issue of the 'zine so I could read more. Nowadays it seems like the pages are filled with longer stories and thus there is less room for other ones. HM2K seems to have followed suit.
Heavy Metal was more like the magazine as it was at the time. It had action, adventure, humour, sex… something for everybody. There was ‘Harry Canyon’ (snerk), a nice noir bit. ‘Den’ had the great Richard Corben stylings, plus John Candy and the over-the-top Bad Guy. (‘She had the most beautiful eyes. I wanted to make some conversation.’ ‘Then you die, she dies, everybody dies.’) ‘Captain Sternn’… hilarious. The segment ‘B-17’ was more serious, and the artwork really looked like the characters were from the '40s. ‘So Beautiful and So Dangerous’, back to the funny. ‘Taarna’ has the climactic battle (and Devo).
Heavy Metal 2000 only had one long story. If you didn’t like it, then too bad. Not that it was ‘bad’, but they already did it in a more compact form in the first movie. It needed more variety.
This is true. I can’t remember exactly when, but at some point HM decided that people didn’t like the serials, and they decided to have fewer stories per issue, but those stories would be complete. I thought this was a huge mistake, as a large reason for purchasing another magazine was to get more of those stories or artists or writers you liked. Without that anticipation from month to month, a lot of the charm of the magazine was gone.
The other thing, and you also touched on it, is that the variety available in one issue was tremendous. Space aliens, demons, sword & sorcery stories, all shared the pages with more mundane and more exotic fare. Art ranged from watercolors to pencil drawings to oils, style ranged from mundane to hyper-realism to comic book and everything in between. There was a tremendous amount of material in an issue during that first 15 years or so.
I wish I could remember when they did that exactly, because I remember reading the Editor’s column about it and thinking “there goes my favorite magazine”. Since then I’ve only bought a handful of issues, and none of them has been nearly as engaging as it was in the late 70s and early 80s.
I’d rather taste 100 dishes than eat one big bowl of rice, no matter how good the rice is.
I had never read a HM magazine (still haven’t actually) when I watched Heavy Metal, I wasn’t an a big fan of the show but I did like the taxi driver story and overall I enjoyed the animation, I think that was nearly 10 years ago now so I should watch it again and see what I think now.
I sort-of followed HM2000 for a while and was willing to suspend my disbelief up to a point, but then it went all haywire in the last few minutes. I just hate stories where (and the original HM had this problem, too) the bad guys have spent the entire time chasing the MacGuffin, and they get it, and it kills them (or in the case of HM2000, leaves one bad guy dead at the doorway and the other, whose big reveal comes out of nowhere, doomed to an eternity alone in the vault). Raiders of the Lost Ark was the only good treatment of this I’ve ever seen.
By the way, the mad robot doctor? Is that the same guy who voices Klaus on American Dad?
I know that I and others have used ‘Hanging’s too good for him. Burning’s too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!’ here on the boards from time to time.
