Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #224 Heavy Metal (1981)

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 four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. 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. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.

I think of myself sometimes as a video game character whose goal is to keep this glorious website and its podcast and literary offshoots alive and going by collecting enough money through crowd-funding and book royalties .

Within this grand, ongoing mission to keep the website alive I have a series of smaller missions, side quests as it were, like watching and writing about all the movies patrons have chosen for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, podcasting and writing about all of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s movies for Travolta/Cage, The Travolta Cage Project and eventually The Travolta Cage Project: Book of John and The Travolta/Cage Project: Book of Nicolas.

But I also have side-missions within side-missions, like writing about the complete filmographies of Tawny Kitaen, Rebecca Gayheart, Oliver Stone and David Bowie for much-appreciated patrons, and smaller side-missions within side-missions like writing up all of Bob Odenkirk’s work as a filmmaker AND movies featuring the music of 70s rock gods Blue Oyster Cult. 

I recently wrote up the agreeably half-assed Full Moon rock and roll radio horror comedy Bad Channels, which featured two songs and a score by Blue Oyster Cult, and followed it up with the abysmal 70s stoner nostalgia comedy The Stoned Age, which follows the misadventures of a Blue Oyster Cult fan over the course of a bleary night. I am now finishing the Blue Oyster Cult trilogy with a fond look back at the 1981 Canadian animated cult classic Heavy Metal, which features a bitching rock and roll soundtrack featuring heavyweights like Devo, Cheap Trick, Donald Fagen, Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult, who contribute the gloriously titled “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” 

I only caught up with Heavy Metal a few years ago when I wrote about it for an article in GQ about the cosmic stew of trippy science fiction stoner movies out of which Thor: Ragnarok emerged triumphantly. 

I don’t know why it took me so long to see Heavy Metal. Based solely on the cover of its video box I assumed that it was dumb, pervy fantasy fare for horny stoners based on the fact that it was aggressively marketed as being pervy fantasy fare for horny stoners. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong! Heavy Metal is actually intelligent, even cerebral fantasy, science-fiction and horror fare for horny stoners, men and women of distinction who enjoy both consuming god’s green ganja and staring appreciatively at big naked cartoon boobies, preferably at the same time. 

While I’m not a fantasy guy and have never been into heavy metal, everything else about Heavy Metal is very distinctly my aesthetic. I love rock and roll in movies even when I don’t like the acts involved. 

When given a choice between Tarkovsky’s The Mirror or an exploitation movie where a rock and roll DJ is threatened by a mad slasher during a New Year’s Eve countdown of the top New Wave hits I’m going to choose the horror movie 99 times out of 100. 

So even though I’m not a huge fan of the acts on Heavy Metal soundtrack other than Cheap Trick, Fagen (as part of Steely Dan) and Devo I love that Heavy Metal is a movie that fucking rocks, that has rock and roll in its DNA and an insatiable appetite for rebellion and decadence. 

Even though I am straight-edge, on account of drugs being against the law and also bad for your health, I love stoner movies every bit as much as I would if I were, say, a lifelong stoner who is frequently high when he watches movies such as Heavy Metal. 

I dig the movie’s countercultural vibe. It feels like a product of the late 1960s and 1970s that got released a few years too late, a New Hollywood-style head film for a blockbuster decade. It’s the feature film adaptation of the magazine of the same name but its roots extend joyously to National Lampoon (which made an even bigger splash on the big screen thanks in no small part to Heavy Metal producer Ivan Reitman’s Animal House) and Tales From the Crypt. 

The Tales From the Crypt influence is felt most heavily in a framing sequence that finds an evil green orb known as Loc-Nar that represents the pervasiveness and enduring nature of evil terrorizing a little girl whose astronaut father it just destroyed with a series of terror tales that span worlds and eras and prominently feature big naked cartoon boobs. 

We begin with “Harry Canyon”, a hard-boiled detective story with a difference: it takes place in a dystopian 2031 New York so destitute that the cops charge to solve crime and instead of a grizzled, world-weary shamus it revolves around a taxi driver who has seen it all and isn’t impressed by any of it. 

In time-honored pulp tradition, our cynical anti-hero encounters a vulnerable woman in terrible trouble who desperately needs his help. It seems her father encountered the Loc-Nar and now some very shady characters are after it and her by association. 

Like pretty much all the women in the movie, she’s an absolute knockout with gams that won’t quit and shapely, disproportionately large breasts that are showcased extensively, naked and otherwise. 

If Heavy Metal was only the naked cartoon boob delivery system it was cynically but not inappropriately marketed as it would still be a roaring success. Heavy Metal contains naked cartoon boobs of considerable quality as well as quantity. 

Heavy Metal is soft-core porn. It’s clearly the work of animators who practiced drawing naked boobs for their own onanistic purposes but the filmmakers are thankfully just as committed to social commentary, satire and world-building as they are giving audiences something to masturbate to and watch while smoking the devil’s lettuce. 

The next segment follows a quintessential Poindexter, a real 98 pound weakling brilliantly voiced by John Candy who is transformed into a muscle-bound warrior who looks more than a little like an absurdly jacked Yul Brenner by Loc-Nar and hurled into a fantastical realm known as Neverwhere. 

There the stranger in a strange land has sex with multiple over-sexed Amazons with impossibly perfect breasts and nobly decides to give up the Loc-Nar despite its incredible power. 

Candy’s SCTV compatriots Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy take center stage in “So Beautiful and So Dangerous” as a sort of intergalactic Cheech and Chong, stoner space aliens who get really fucked up on illicit substances—just like the audience—and attempt to land their craft. 

The final segment, “Taarna" is the longest as well as the weakest because it deviates so strongly from the funky social satire, social commentary and comedy that distinguishes the film at its finest in favor of pure fantasy with a decidedly voyeuristic bent. 

The vignette follows Taarna, the sole surviving member of an ancient race of fierce warriors sworn to protect a gentle people made up of scientists and philosophers. Taarna takes a LOT of time to get dressed, considering that her battle armor covers about as much of her body as a bikini would. 

But if “Taarna” is horny and adolescent even by the film’s very lenient standards and also feels unmistakably like a 1970s van with a Frank Frazetta babe airbrushed on the side in cartoon form it’s nevertheless deeply satisfying eye candy. 

The animation in Heavy Metal is seldom less than stunning. Forget 3-D: the kaleidoscopic tableaus and deep-focus compositions here are so dense, textured and rich that they feel more like 4-D, 5-D or even fabled 6-D.

Like seemingly everyone who has seen Jodorowsky’s Dune, I’m bummed that the world-changing marvel breathlessly chronicled in it was never made. But in a world where Flash Gordon and Heavy Metal—which is partially based on the stories of Moebius, a concept artist on Jodorowsky’s film—both exist it feels like we nevertheless got a taste of what might have been. 

Because while Heavy Metal is science fiction as spectacle and science fiction as pornography it’s as obsessed with ideas as it is boobs and trippy shit and that exhilarating undercurrent of substance makes its style all the more exciting and irresistible. 

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