Directors: Michael Coldeway & Michel Lemire
Voice Actors: Julie Strain, Michael Ironside, Billy Idol
It took eight people to write Heavy Metal 2000, the film I
will be reviewing today, and you know how that goes, the more writers a film
has, the worse the movie is going to be! And this movie had eight writers! Was
the resulting script a disaster? Or did these eight writers achieve their goals
of making a movie that paid tribute to one of the greatest sci-fi/horror
magazines on the planet? So anyhow, this is Heavy Metal 2000 (2000), the sequel
to the animated cult classic anthology film Heavy Metal (1981). Now if you know
anything about the original film, then you probably know that it’s composed of
various stories, all done by different animation houses. This amalgamation of
talent yielded an melting pot of short films with some of the worst and some of
the best animation you will ever see, so it’s interesting in that sense.
Nothing stays the same for very long, just when you think you’ve had enough of
a particular short, soon another artistic style and voice takes over. The
soundtrack on Heavy Metal is a memorable one, including many awesome rock and
roll bands from the 70’s and 80’s. Today I review the sequel, Heavy Metal 2000.
The thing to remember while watching this sequel is that it’s vastly different
than the first film.
In contrast to the first Heavy Metal (1981), this sequel
isn’t an anthology film; Heavy Metal 2000 sticks to only one story, this
immediately shatters our expectations of it. Fans of the first film expected
this sequel to maintain the anthology format, so they were disappointed to
discover that with this sequel, they were going to get just one feature length
story. I enjoy the amalgamation of different artistic talents that an anthology
brings, but I also appreciate the fact that this sequel was going for something
different. In its defense I will say that even though Heavy Metal 2000 isn’t an
anthology, it still manages to retain that feel of what Heavy Metal Magazine is
all about. If you didn’t already know, both of these movies are inspired by
Heavy Metal Magazine, a magazine totally devoted to science fiction, horror and
fantasy comics. It is a magazine filled with stories that are exactly like the
story we see in Heavy Metal 2000. As a fan of this magazine, I can tell you I’ve
read my fare share of issues, most of the stories include half naked heroines
fighting muscular evil dudes, sorcerers, magicians, aliens, you name it. Many
of the stories include nudity, violence and gore in one form or another. This
is why I say that Heavy Metal 2000 captures the feel of the magazine; it has
all the elements you’d expect to find on any given issue. Yet even though Heavy
Metal 2000 is inspired by Heavy Metal magazine and gets everything right in
terms of the spirit of the magazine, Heavy Metal 2000 is actually based on a
graphic novel called ‘Melting Pot’, which was written by Kevin Eastman, Simon
Bisley and Eric Talbot. Kevin Eastman created the original Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles (along with co-creator Peter Laird) and is the current publisher and
editor (and has been for years) of Heavy Metal Magazine, so he truly knows what
Heavy Metal is all about. This explains why he is one of the writers of the
film.
Above: Issue #4 of 'Melting Pot', the comic series on which Heavy Metal 2000 is based on
Below: Lady Death, an example of the Bad Girl comic craze of the 90's
So let’s keep things in perspective, Heavy Metal 2000 isn’t
Shakespeare and it never intends to be. Heavy Metal Magazine has always been
about the type of stories that sci-fi/horror fans love to read. Stories filled
with the fantastic, the horrifying, the shocking. This magazine has always been
a love letter to low brow entertainment, it’s the kind of literature that some
will no doubt consider immature, and they’d be right, these stories are often
times juvenile in nature, but that’s the nature of the beast. And so, Heavy
Metal 2000 basks in its b-movie roots, unashamedly so. Trust me when I say that
one liners will be spoken, in fact, you’ll feel that it is the only language
these characters speak. In this film you will see females being treated like
sex objects and the females loving it. For example, Julie Strain does the voice
of the main character in the film, a bad ass lady who goes by the name of ‘Jules’.
She’s you’re a-typical bad ass babe. During the 90’s Bad Girls were the rave of
the comic book world; suddenly every comic book was about Bad Girls with big
boobs and even bigger guns! During those days we had comics like Vampirella,
Lady Death and Danger Girl. And though Heavy Metal 2000 was released at the
beginning of the new millennium, it still retains that 90’s Bad Girl vibe to
it. You’ll notice the emphasis on showing Jules breasts bouncing all the way
through the movie, sometimes the camera will focus entirely on her ass, or take
its time showing her taking a shower, it’s all very gratuitous, designed to titillate
teenage boys. You should see the extras on the Heavy Metal 2000 dvd, where Mrs.
Strain talks all about how much she loves being the sexy sci-fi chick and
showing some skin. She’s the ultimate tease for young boys (and men in general)
kind of like a sci-fi version of Elvira. She knows you like her jugs, and she’s
got no problem showing them to you, in fact, she loves the adulation she gets
from it. Julie Strain obviously infused the character of Jules with her own
persona, so much so that they even share the same name.
Above, Julie Strain dressed up as Jules, below her animated counterpart
On this film, Jules is out for revenge. You see, this power
hungry madman who goes by the name of Tyler is on his way to a distant planet
that holds the gates to immortality. Tyler has the key, and he aims to use it
in order to acquire immortality. Problem is that whoever holds the key goes
insane from lust of power, and so throughout the movie Tyler destroys, rapes
and kills anything on his path. Too bad for him that on one of his joy rides he
ends up killing Jules family and her people. To make matters worse, Tyler
kidnaps Jules sister because he thinks she’s hot. Now Jules is on a race to try
and stop Tyler from acquiring immortality, while avenging her people and
rescuing her sister!
I’ve always had a couple of problems with this movie. Number one, the animation is not the best. Maybe it’s because its old school, but I’ve seen old school animation films with excellent traditional hand drawn animation, so maybe it’s just the animation on this show isn’t really that good. Then again, it’s American animation, which has never distinguished itself for being excellent. And they do that thing where they mix computer generated images with traditional hand drawn animation and it sucks big time because back in those days computer animation was just getting started, so whatever computer animation the squeezed into any given scene looks amateurish by today’s standards. Then again, maybe I’ve been spoiled rotten by anime films. That being said, once I got accustomed to the films look and the choppy animation, I found myself having fun with it. Same story with Ralph Bakshi films, you just gotta get accustomed to the fact that the animation is a little rough around the edges.
I’ve always had a couple of problems with this movie. Number one, the animation is not the best. Maybe it’s because its old school, but I’ve seen old school animation films with excellent traditional hand drawn animation, so maybe it’s just the animation on this show isn’t really that good. Then again, it’s American animation, which has never distinguished itself for being excellent. And they do that thing where they mix computer generated images with traditional hand drawn animation and it sucks big time because back in those days computer animation was just getting started, so whatever computer animation the squeezed into any given scene looks amateurish by today’s standards. Then again, maybe I’ve been spoiled rotten by anime films. That being said, once I got accustomed to the films look and the choppy animation, I found myself having fun with it. Same story with Ralph Bakshi films, you just gotta get accustomed to the fact that the animation is a little rough around the edges.
Heavy Metal 2000 has its moments, like when Jules and Tyler
meet up on this pleasure planet of sorts, filled with strippers with six
breasts and aliens from all sorts of planets, it reminded me a bit of the
cantina scene from Star Wars, if the cantina scene from Star Wars had been
rated ‘R’. And by the way, speaking of this films rating, they don’t even make
live action ‘R’ rated films like this one today! I mean, this is a hard ‘R’
rated film! There’s tons of gratuitous nudity, profanity is common place, and
the gore, well, even for a cartoon it’s over the top at times. In that sense,
this film is extremely rare, it’s an animated ‘R’ rated film! You don’t see one
of those every day. Last time I saw one of those was Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006), another one that
comes to mind is South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999). Every once in a
while, an adventurous filmmaker will make one from time to time, but the truth
is that the R rated animated film is rare because (with rare exceptions) they
are not marketable. For a time there, animated films for adults where trying to
find its corner in the market with films like Fritz the Cat (1972), Fire and Ice (1983) and American Pop (1981), but I guess it proved too difficult to get the
common American adult to think of animation as anything more than the stuff of
Saturday Morning Cartoons or children’s films. So Heavy Metal 2000 is a rare
bird, on this one axes slice people in half, brains are blown to smithereens
and sex robots can be bought at the corner of the street.
The soundtrack of the first film is one of the most memorable
things about it; it included old school rock and roll bands like Blue Oyster
Cult, Stevie Nicks, Journey, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, Devo and even Sammy
Hagar. So of course, the soundtrack for Heavy Metal 2000 had to amass an
interesting amount of bands as well. On this sequel we get the likes of
Pantera, Monster Magnet, Coal Chamber, Bauhaus, Insane Clown Pose, Queens of
the Stone Age, System of a Down and Puya. The problem for me with this
soundtrack is that sometimes, the visuals don’t match with the music. Sometimes
there’s a real hardcore song going on and it just doesn’t go with the visuals.
The same thing happened when Dario Argento started using heavy metal in his
horror movies, the heavy metal just didn’t mix with the visuals, thank god he stopped
doing it after a while. This is
something very important on any film, the visuals have to go in accordance and
sometimes even to the rhythm of the music. Not so here where songs are
apparently randomly inserted into a scene without rhyme or reason. It feels
like the songs where only inserted into the film in order to sell a soundtrack
and not because the song is perfect for the scene. This truly sucks in my book.
The other problem I had with it is the weak direction and
the editing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any movie that uses fade to black so
often! This is one of the signs of amateurish filmmaking, fade to black is what
you resort to when you’ve got nowhere else to go because you forgot to film a
transition or establishing shot. There’s no way to flow from one scene to the
next so you fade to black. Well, they do this all the time in Heavy Metal 2000
and it just reeks of bad filmmaking. So there’s unevenness in the editing and
the music. Strange thing is that even with all these imperfections, I still managed to have fun with Heavy Metal 2000. Its dialog, sense of humor and
mentality is so comic bookish that I ended up surrendering to it and having a
blast. It’s a film made for adults who want to feel 12 years old again. It’s
the kind of film in which when the masses are calling his name, the villain
says “Blind adulation makes me so horny! Get me a wench!” At first I hated Heavy
Metal 2000 with a passion, but it’s grown on me over the years. It’s rude, raw,
loud, imperfect and sexist, but that’s exactly the way it should be, or else it
wouldn’t be Heavy Metal. The original Heavy Metal film is superior in the sense
that if offers a larger variety of stories and styles, the animation is a
million times superior and because the soundtrack is infinitely more melodic
and plain cool, but this sequel is definitely worth a watch, if you can get
over the imperfections.
Rating: 3 out of 5
4 comments:
Comic book game was very strong in Russia I the late 90s. I came back from the States 1999 and I was amazed, how everything was different. It was very hard to catch a movie in a theater, because theaters were pretty dead at that point. No broadband internet. No decent video games. The thing with most content that was sold in Russia in the late 90s was the license. If it wasn't licensed - it wasn't sold. As you can imagine, it was very easy to license b-movies, old comics and shit. I literally matured with the whole vhs rental thing that was going around. Some wise folks were smuggling Heavy Metal to Russia and I was buying every issue. These comic books spoke my language. Imagine my amusement, when I rented Heavy Metal 2000. I was really looking forward to love this thing, but it turned out to be bad. A few years ago I thought that it might have gotten better as it aged. It didn't. In fact it got worse. The original Heavy Metal was so much better.
Wow, it must've been hell having such a difficult time getting movies, video games and comics! I myself can't live without them. Heavey Metal 2000 is a lesser film I agree, the first one is far superior. But I decided to give it a chance and lowered my expectations, I kind of decided to accept it for what it was. It's no masterpiece, but its trashy fun in my book. On the other hand I can watch and re-watch the original Heavy Metal no problem, I've loved it since day one.
There was going to be a third Heavy Metal film, David Fincher was amassing an interesting group of directors (amongst them Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron), but sadly it never came to be. Last I heard Robert Rodriguez had the rights to Heavy Metal movie, I hope he gets it made and manages to gather a good group of directors and animators to be a part of it.
I think that Rodriguez lost his point at some way. I remember his old stuff and it was great, but these days, you know, meh.
Agree with you Sergei, I love his early stuff as well, right now he is a hit or miss kind of director which is why I always go and check out his films. I hope he does something that really cooks soon, I love it when he makes an awesome movie. For me his high points have been Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado and Planet Terror.
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