1981 - HEAVY METAL, the adults only animated film

A series of animated science fiction and fantasy stories based on stories from a magazine called Heavy Metal.  The quality of the animation is extremely variable but the look of the film is interesting for the most part.  The film ties together nine stories with some sort of interconnecting theme of a mysterious green orb that has the power to do evil things or something like that.

Heavy Metal has a lot of vocal talent but it's chief interest for me were some of the performers of the SCTV TV show contributing to the various episodes.  I identified John Candy with his distinctive voice in three of the episodes, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy are in a couple of the stories.  "Dean Wormer" himself, John Vernon from Animal House and the writer Doug Kenny of Animal House and Caddyshack fame are also in the film.  This casting is probably unsurprising since one of the producers of the film is Ivan Reitman who went on to have a fairly successful career with films like Ghostbusters, Stripes, Twins and Kindergarten Cop .  Reitman had been associated with most of these performers off and on during their careers.

 

OK back to film.  Heavy Metal's reputation rests chiefly on it's blend of nudity, sex and violence.  So if your tolerance for this kind of stuff, particularly in a cartoon format is low, this film is probably not for you.  As I said the film does look interesting and you have to give the production and animation team points for making something different.  

The film has a rock score from Black Sabbath, Blue Oyser Cult, Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick  DEVO, Journey and Nazareth but I don't recall any of the music particularly standing out.  Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein of all people provided the symphonic score.

 

Heavy Metal has a series of writers and directors but the writer Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Total Recall) is the only person who I recognize.  The running time of this film is 90 minutes which is just fine as a little of this cartoon sex and violence stuff can only go so far in an animated film.