`Heavy Metal' Rocks Again -- Cult Cartoon Fantasy Returns To Big Screen Before Going To Video

"Turn it up!" shouted several enthusiastic members of the preview audience when "Heavy Metal" made its local theatrical debut 15 years ago.

"Turn it up!" was again the audience cry at last week's preview of the national reissue, which opens tomorrow in 39 cities, including Seattle. Columbia Pictures' new 35mm prints were remastered using state-of-the-art Sony Dynamic Digital Sound.

In neither case, however, did the volume increase noticeably. Nor would it have made all that much difference if a projectionist had cranked it up. It's just a movie that seems like it should be loud.

"Heavy Metal" never did deliver on its title, even with a score that includes contributions by Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Journey, Nazareth and Grand Funk Railroad. The key contributor to the soundtrack is actually Elmer Bernstein, a veteran Hollywood composer ("To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Magnificent Seven") whose milder music dominates.

Faithful to the magazine

Every bit as sexist, sappy and chaotic as it seemed when it was first released in 1981, "Heavy Metal" is a feature-length cartoon drawn from the imagery of a fantasy publication devoted to swords, sorcery and cartoon nudity.

The drawings of grotesque violence and sexuality are quite faithful to the magazine, and they're animated in the flamboyantly pointless manner of Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards" (1977), which helped pave the way for the all-style, minimal-substance approach that drives such Japanese cartoons as "Akira" and "Fist of the North Star."

The movie's Canadian director/ curator, Gerald Potterton, uses the images as visual accompaniment to a collection of short stories, beginning with "Soft Landing," a prologue designed by Dan O'Bannon, one of the "Alien" screenwriters.

The high point is Juan Gimenez and Dan Goldberg's "Harry Canyon," a story about a tough New York cab driver in the year 2031, when the United Nations building has become a low-rent housing project, the Statue of Liberty is surrounded by skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge is condemned. The low point: John Bruno's stupefying 27-minute-long finale, "Legend of Taama," in which grotesque sword-and-sorcery spectacle overwhelms a feeble storyline.

Heavy on violence, sex

The screenplay by Goldberg and Len Blum (their latest collaboration is the film version of Howard Stern's "Private Parts") contrives to draw all the stories to a central narrative - which keeps coming back to the notion that ultimate evil exists in the form of a green, glowing, destructive sphere that frightens little girls with nightmare stories.

Although the movie was assembled from the work of more than 1,000 animators and technicians working in 17 countries, it includes several recurring images: vivid decapitations of aliens with green blood, soft-core glimpses of pumpkin-breasted Amazons, New York as a futuristic wasteland, copulation as a form of passionless exercise, robots as sexual beings.

Mostly the movie seems to be about female breasts, teen fantasies in which sexual luck plays a major role ("Eighteen years of nothing - and then twice in one day!") and Playboy harem girls who coo things like "If any part of me pleasures your senses. . . ." It's a little spooky to watch "Heavy Metal" with an audience that's familiar enough with it to recite lines like that before the actors do.

(The cast of Canadian voices includes Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramos, John Vernon and the late John Candy. The producer, Ivan Reitman, is now better-known as the director of "Dave" and "Ghostbusters.")

Over the past 15 years, "Heavy Metal" has consistently drawn crowds at revival houses and midnight screenings, though it's never been a critics' favorite. Danny Peary doesn't even mention it in his exhaustive 150-film, three-book series, "Cult Movies."

Leonard Maltin's "TV Movies" gives it a surprising thumbs-up ("great fun on a mindless, adolescent level"), but many reviewers agreed with British critic Martyn Auty's dismissal of the movie as "a cosmic junk heap . . . whose roots reach all the way back to post-hippie paranoia . . . (the animators) have a lot to answer for."

During the past decade and a half, "Heavy Metal" has not been available on videotape, chiefly because of complicated music rights. That's given it a forbidden-fruit quality that's about to disappear. The theatrical reissue is a prelude to the first video release, which will happen shortly before summer.