Drawn... to be Wiiiiiiiild.

It's probably one of those well known but seldom discussed facts that pre-teen boys (actually boys of pretty much any age if we're honest)  will go to unreasonable lengths to see a pair of boobs. Those of you who were once a pre-teen boy yourselves might remember the hysteria that accompanied the discovery of a tattered porn mag somewhere in a park bush and the inevitable disappointment that accompanied finding out some jobsworthy council employee had either snagged or binned it before school ended. Those of you who have never been a pre-teen boy, really you haven't missed much. Suffice to say, such was the clamour for that first glimpse of mammary that pretty much anything would count. We are simple creatures. 

Heavy Metal (the magazine and subsequent movie, not the musical genre) had a legendary status of its own; it was sort of acceptable because it was drawings rather than photos but it was still taboo (taboobs?) because it was chock full of scantily clad/ naked women and gore aplenty. It was also pretty rare to get hold of a copy especially when your newsagent was astute enough to stick them up on the high shelves and no way in the world were you ever going to convince your Mum to get it for you on a subscription.

I remember hearing about the movie in my youth; tales abounded of all sorts of risqué shenanigans, violence by the gallon and all sorts of that grown up stuff that was always so inviting. Sadly, the fine and upstanding moral pillars of society entirely consistently foiled my attempts to watch it at the time and it faded from memory. Until, just like the One Ring, it found its way back; not quite so mystically however, I just saw it for £3 on Fopp's bargain section. I honestly had no idea what to expect after all this time. I'd always thought it was this grand fantasy spectacle, full of groundbreaking animation techniques, taut dialogue and wanton wish fulfilment. What it is in fact is an anthology of ropey looking short stories woven together by a preposterous cheesy plot device and garnished with a large sprinkling of 'dear God, I could have spent £3 on a cheap hammer and bludgeoned myself into a vegetative state and still have had a comparabletime'. The hyperbole is strong with this one. 

It's all pretty random if you take the segments individually and the filmmakers at least acknowledged that. They realised they had a bunch of different teams working on different sides of the planet and like Tales from the Crypt's Cryptkeeper they needed something to tie it all together. I can only assume copious psychoactive substances had been consumed prior to the development meetings though, because their final concept was... let's just be polite and go with interesting. I might have gone with something a little less abstract myself, but apparently having a sentient, malevolent, glowing green alien sphere narrate his way through each tale was the best thing they could rustle up between bong hits and trips to the 24 hour store for munchies. 

Said orb, the Loc-Nar, is escorted to Earth in a shoddily rotoscoped convertible by a fairly cavalier mustachioed fellow who ends up instantly vapourised for his troubles. For some reason Loc-Nar decides to monologue at the guy's permanently open-mouthed daughter  which leads us to flashbacks/flashforwards of the self-professed sum of all evil peddling his influence all over the cosmos. Mobsters, taxi drivers and busty dames in future New York where pretty much everyone gets vapourised; a high-school nerd randomly experimenting with lightning in his bedroom (because of course he is) gets transported across dimensions into the body of a barbarian type where everyone's skin randomly seems to change colour for no reason what-so-ever, but relatively few people get vapourised; what I guess counts as a courtroom drama mixed with Jekyll and Hyde where nobody gets vapourised at all which is a touch disappointing; a World War 2 bomber filled with zombies which sort of dissolved rather than got vapourized; an alien abduction skit with a disturbingly horny robot and stoner aliens and a finale involving a warrior woman with a vocabulary as tiny as her outfit. Only after this do we find out the orb has singled out the girl because she can destroy him which she somehow does just by watching the last story, before her house explodes and she flies off on one of the bird creatures from said preceding tale. Yeah.

It's pretty awful and surprisingly so considering the pedigree of some of the people involved. Dan O'Bannon, he of Alien/Total Recall penmanship, wrote (arguably the best) one of the segments and the voice cast a bunch of famous 80s names in it including Uncle Buck and Egon Spengler. It's weirdly influential though. You can see shades of all sorts of Sci Fi and Fantasy movies running through it; the segment with the taxi driver is really reminiscent parts of Fifth Element (that ought to be the other way around probably come to think of it) and there's a certain amount of Red Sonja peeking through in another part. The animation is pretty crap in a 'Saturday morning cartoon" way but I don't know if I'm being overly harsh on a nearly forty year old movie; let's go with dated and give them the benefit of the doubt. Points for effort maybe? Speaking of dated, there is some fantastically 80s hair metal on the soundtrack which sits really awkwardly with the inclusion of synth pop weirdos Devo (fun fact kids, the main songwriter from Devo went on to score the Rugrats theme tune as well as more recently the Lego Movie. Whip It a long distant memory then) and some very theatrical and dramatic traditional score from the same guy who did The Ten Commandments and The Magnificent Seven. All the trivia today, great for pub quizzes.

I'm reliably informed (via the accompanying documentary on the DVD extras) that the preferred method of watching Heavy Metal is to be absolutely stoned out of your box when I presume all this makes perfect sense. Seeing as I don't use The Horse, I'm going to have to file it away with Battle of the Planets, He-Man and Thundercats and chalk it up to another victory of nostalgia over quality.