Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #184 Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal (2001)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

As a pop culture writer I am forever on the lookout for unexpected themes and coincidences. I love seeing how seemingly unrelated bits of detritus overlap and parallel one another. 

So I was amused to discover that both of the trashy, low-budget direct to video sequels I’m writing about this week for both Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and Direct-to-Video Sequel month almost eerily echo two of my all-time favorite comic bits. 

As I wrote about yesterday, 1999’s From Dusk Til Dawn: The Hangman’s Daughter eerily foreshadows the genius of Andy Daly’s Dalton Wilcox Cowboy Poet Laureate/Monster-hunter character with Michael Parks’ wonderful portrayal of real-life superstar author and journalist Ambrose Bierce as both a paragon of folksy, All-American wisdom and a vampire-slayer/monster killer. 

2001’s Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, meanwhile, couldn’t help but remind me of the classic Scharpling & Wurster routine “The First Band on Everest” with its campy depiction of a gimmicky, high-altitude rock concert gone horribly awry. 

In “The First Band on Everest” a group of Alt-Rock pretenders set out to be the first rock band to play a concert on Everest and end up paying a terrible, hilarious price for their hubris and lack of preparation. 

In Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, meanwhile, Marilyn Manson-style superstar shock rocker Slade Craven’s plans to stage his farewell concert on an airplane for 40 lucky fans and webcast the results to the world is complicated by Satan-worshipping cultists taking the plane hostage. 

If that sounds utterly, deliciously ridiculous, it is. Just as From Dusk Til Dawn 3 lives up to the enormous potential endemic in casting Michael Parks as a vampire-battling Ambrose Bierce in 1913 Mexico, Heavy Metal is just as gloriously idiotic as you would hope a movie whose premise is essentially Passenger 57 but with a bootleg good Marilyn Manson figure fighting an off-brand evil Marilyn Manson knock-off would be.

On the internet! 

Yes, Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal is a product of that gloriously naive age when low-rent filmmakers could pitch, “and then they show it on the internet! To the kids! On computers!” and financiers would throw money at them in order to help them realize their zeitgeist-friendly, cutting-edge visions. 

Then again, Turbulence 3 hit video stores in 2001. That makes it a very old movie, not unlike the 1927 Jazz Singer or The Battleship Potempkin so of course the technology in it is going to be primitive as hell, some seriously backwards cyber-Luddite shit. 

Every time Turbulence 3 wants to wow us with the incredible power and sophistication of contemporary computer technology it looks about as advanced as a game of Pong played at half-speed.

The movie’s adorably, endearingly off take on the wacky world of computers extends to the wonderfully outside the box casting and costuming of the brotastic Craig Sheffer as brilliant computer hacker Nick Watts, whose look is largely purloined from Jay Leno: jeans, baby blue shirt with a flower pattern, mustache, John Lennon glasses and a blue bandana around the forehead for fashion. 

Nick ends up developing an unlikely friendship and life-saving partnership with Slade Craven (John Mann), a Marilyn Manson knockoff who is as heroic and brave as the real-life Manson is a disgusting monster. 

The intensely unsurprising revelation that Manson is abusive and sinister in real life as well as his art can’t help but cast a bit of a dark shadow over Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, and all other Marilyn Manson-derived entertainment. 

The face, and facial hair, of today’s super-sophisticated computer hacker.

It’s still enormous dumb fun to watch a rock superstar save a 747 full of goths from Satanists but it’s not quite as innocent as it once was because we now know just how monstrous its primary inspiration truly is. 

The action kicks off with Slade and his band performing their forgettable brand of self-consciously transgressive heavy metal onboard a flight packed full of fans. Things begin to go awry, however, when the ostensible star of the show begins killing people onboard the plane in a highly theatrical fashion, including its pilot. 

This leaves co-pilot MacIntosh in charge. MacIntosh is played by a slumming Rutger Hauer in what appears to be a real waste of one of the all-time great badass character actors. Why cast an icon like Hauer in your silly second direct to video sequel to a movie that wasn’t much to begin with if you’re going to waste him in a boring pilot role?

Thankfully, Macintosh isn’t at all what he appears to be. He’s no generic working stiff. Rather, he’s a suicidal Satan worshipper (and Vietnam veteran, just for spice) who belongs to an evil cult, loves classical music and has committed himself to crashing the plane into East Kansas, on account of East Kansas being one of the most evil places in the world, at least according to a screenplay that, to be honest, is a little lacking in verisimilitude. 

You know a movie is special when it has you Googling “Is east Kansas evil?”

Now THAT is how you make the most of your two or three days with a screen legend like Hauer. You don’t waste his time playing a nobody; instead you have him play the craziest motherfucker in a movie that brings the crazy in Texas-sized amounts. 

It takes sexy FBI agent FBI Agent Kate Hayden (Gabrielle Anwar), FBI Agent Frank Garner (Joe Mantegna, picking up a paycheck) and ground control way too long to figure out that the lunatic waving a gun around and pretending to be Slade is actually a Satanic cultist who has hijacked the plane with secret helpers and that the actual Slade is the passengers’ only real hope for survival. 

The real Slade defeats the fake Slade without too much trouble and then spends the film’s climax landing the plane with the assistance of super-fan hacker Nick Watts, who is an expert at leading planes due to his love of flying simulations. 

If this all sounds incredibly stupid and silly and entertaining, then I am doing my job correctly. Turbulence 3 is just as much of a hilarious camp oddity as I vaguely remembered, a sort of Hot Topic Die Hard in the sky that lustily embraces vulgar stupidity and stupid vulgarity. 

I had a blast watching it for free on Tubi and if you are in the right frame of mind (i.e drunk or stoned and looking for a cheap, sleazy good time) I suspect you will as well. 

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