Left: Ivan Reitman takes a quick breather between pulling double duty on HEAVY
METAL and STRIPES. Below: Michael C. Gross wondering when all the insanity will end.
destruction and ridiculousness is difficult to achieve in any film. But the beauty of animation is that it
regular people doing regular drugs—it has trunked pink aliens snorting “plutonium nyborg” off the floor. It doesn’t just have zombies, or just war planes—it has zombies on war planes. Flying cars? Elementary, my dear. It’s not HEAVY METAL unless it’s a flying Corvette landing like a monster truck in the desert after being launched from space.
And how about a resounding cheer for that opening sequence? An astronaut in a classic car, slithering out of a spaceship and parachuting down to the tune of Riggs’s “Rader Rider”… you feel rad just watching it, to say nothing of actually producing it. And yet, the entire sequence almost didn’t happen in time for release! When an animator backed out at the last minute, the crew had twelve weeks to film an actual Corvette (in London—they almost had to ship one over), then cut out every single photo of it for animation. Each frame was hand-cut and hand-painted. “But in the end,” admits Gross, “it looked cool!” And “cool” was pretty much the order of
the day. Gross claims that the operation was much like that of a Roger Corman monster movie: “We were just a bunch of guys having fun, making a cool movie.” Even the silliness is there—provided partly by the adolescent cinematic themes of 1980, and partly by producer Ivan Reitman, who was simultaneously filming STRIPES. This proved to be both a blessing and a curse, as the material lost much of the sophistication of the original French magazine, but with Reitman at the helm, resources expanded to include a vocal cast of epic—and certainly comedic—proportions: John Candy, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty— household names giving
laugh-out-loud
treatment to bizarre circumstances. Yet, despite all the shtick, the movie has some genuinely unsettling moments. A jungle of crashed plane-zombies lurk like
wronged war victims. A crazed
official attempts rape in the middle of a Pentagon meeting. People are slaughtered and disemboweled despite valiant efforts to defend themselves.
The alternating
allows for intense mood-creation that is nigh impossible in traditional live-action. The differing animation and storytelling methods of the movie give it an almost psychedelic overtone (no doubt explaining the legions of fans who would attend midnight showings while “under the influence”). “I know some parts weren’t done correctly and there were a lot of problems with making the film, but when you pull it all together, it’s an awesome ride. You strap yourself into a little spaceship and take off into HEAVY METAL,” grins Hal Hefner. “We think of it as a music genre, but it’s about a lifestyle.” And Heavy Metal is certainly a style.
The film solidifies that style: spaceships, loincloths, flying insects, glowing toxins, jaded pilots. Sex jokes in sultry tango with subtle commentary on religion and mixed marriages. Technology married to earthly powers; metal and magic. “People always talk to me about steampunk,” says Gross, referring to the contemporary love affair with retro-mechanical style. “And I say, who was the original, brilliant steampunk artist? It was [French HEAVY METAL creator] Moebius. Nobody else.” One thing’s for sure: HEAVY METAL has yet to go out of style. And here’s to hoping that it never does.
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • SEP/OCT 2011 77
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