Woe to the uninformed viewer who comes to this movie expecting a erudite and mature venture, for "Heavy Metal" is anything but. The film is sophomoric, crude and, dependent on the tolerance of your views, mildly pornographic. But if you're a guy and you go in with the hopes of watching something that will tickle both your masculine id (as well as other regions), then you'll feel satisfied. The be more succinct, the equation that easily sums up this film is: boobs + sex + violence = cool.
The film is an anthology of tales, presumably all adapted from the magazine by the same name. The catalyst for all these stories coming to surface is a glowing, sentient orb known as the Loc-Nar, a powerful source of evil that's been from one side of the universe to the next. It recounts its travels and the havoc it brought to a young nymph trapped in a dishelved house. It seems that its explorations boil down to an intergalactic Rube Goldberg device, producing zombies, mutant supermen and spurned women in the process. As is the case in any anthology though, some stories are hits and others miss.
A segment entitled "B-17" is a great deal of fun - the corpses of dead soldiers on board are reanimated by the Loc-Nar (for shits and giggles, I suppose) and they assault the still-living. Another segment with a great deal of humor is "So Beautiful, So Dangerous" where the audience is treated to a robot screwing a buxom secretary and two aliens doing the longest line of cocaine in history, only to be followed by an on screen "trip." Watching that, I realized that I really shouldn't have been watching the film sober. It would have made the soundtrack more fun as well, though many of the songs were disappointly left as background audio rather than taking prominence in the film. My biggest issue was the style of animation used. Admittedly, I've never read an issue of "Heavy Metal," so I cannot say whether this is the artwork standard of the rag. However, other animated films of the ilk also turn me away, such as "Wizards" or the animated "Lord of the Rings" (or almost any Don Bluth production). I don't know whether it's the colors, the backgrounds or just the penciling style, but there's a distinct crudeness to it. Though I suppose some would argue that being purposefully crude in animation would only be apropos considering the film...
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