HEAVY METAL 2000 Bitchin'! It's the only word that'll do. I keep getting taken by surprise by movies recently. I expect them to be bad or, at best, middling, and I end up enjoying them. Every review I've read for this movie said it sucked...but I thought Heavy Metal 2000 was pretty bitchin'. Fuck it, I loved this movie! (BIT-chin) v. Possessing the property of being really cool, but cool in a very "unrespectable" way that leaves it easily open to mockery, like a huge Manowar mural airbrushed on the side of somebody's van. Things which are bitchin' tend to seem like they might have been even more bitchin' had they been experienced as a teenager. Long-speculated and -delayed, Heavy Metal 2000 certainly couldn't be worthy of the held collective breath of fans of the first film, but it's a lot of fun in my book, with a lot of bitchin' sights, bitchin' action and a pretty bitchin' plot (as I've said before, I'm always a sucker for sci-fi mixed with high fantasy). Based (probably loosely) on a graphic novel (read: long comic book) by three writers (another six worked on the script!), is basically a simple galactic revenge story set against a mythic backdrop, and even though it only really achieves that mythic grandeur in its final moments, that's probably better than starting with it and then throwing it away. Like I said, I didn't expect much. Heavy Metal 2000's cast of voices doesn't give one much cause for hope. The presence of Billy Idol in a movie like this would've been TOTALLY bitchin' - in 1987. Today, it's just kinda sad...or would be, if I thought this movie was as bad as everybody else seems to think it is. Julie Strain is the kind of, uh, actress that people want to look at, but not listen to; not really my type, but it still begs the question of why she's here (though for whatever it's worth, the hand-drawn character she does the voice for [reportedly modeled on her] looks better than she does). Michael Ironside is always a reliable heavy; not exactly an inspired choice, but always reliable. An ancient mystical key has been unearthed in a distant asteroid belt by some miners, and one of them (Ironside) lives up to what everybody's been saying about that key by appearing to go insane. He doesn't really go insane, but the key does teach him the secret to (limited) immortality, so that leaves him free to indulge in every whim. If he's in a bar and the help isn't fast enough, he kills the help, and who's gonna stop him? Anyway, he manages to accumulate a sizeable following of people who are just afraid to defy him (pirate gangs in this far future seem quite accustomed to such sudden changes in leadership), and takes them on a quest to find the chamber that the key opens, which holds the promise of UNlimited immortality. It looks like he's gonna get a pretty easy ride there, until he slaughters the homeworld of Julie (Strain), who gets pissed off beyond belief (not like you can blame her) and will take her desire for revenge to any length. Idol shows up later as a leader of the people who inhabit the chamber's world. He's an interesting choice for the role, since the role is written as a sort of wise, sagely figure, and when casting for this one, I can't imagine Billy Idol being the first person to come to mind. Still, he does a bitchin' job with the role. Better yet, I liked the older-than-time Guardian of the chamber, who's made of stone and acts in a way which is so unexpected that I found no trace of my typical reaction to this kind of character (Grr!) and I just loved every second he was on screen. Also of note (if kind of an unpleasantly amusing one) is a disgusting creature who promises to show Julie the way across a lake of magma...for a kiss. It's a brilliantly acted bit of voicework, but the character is so revolting that I'm glad he only gets that brief bit before, uh, making his exit. This scene serves no purpose and all, and I loved (rather queasily) the whole thing. Didn't catch the sleazy bastard's name though, so I have no idea who did his voice. Michael Ironside may not be an original choice to voice the villain, but the villain does have some bitchin' character and costume designs, and I like the completely desire-obsessed way he's written (trying to rape a woman in the middle of a busy bar, for example). He's so over-the-top that he even wears a cape and has these bitchin' shoulderpads with these huge horns and tusks coming out of them. Strain is a good, no-nonsense (read: no "womanly" "I didn't want to be violent but I had no choice!" bullshit) ass-kicking heroine who kicks a lot of ass and wears some outrageous, and yes, completely bitchin' outfits. The plot of this one's a lot of fun; it wisely keeps things nice and simple, with its only big twists (two of 'em) coming at the end, one of which is bitchin' (that "mythic grandeur" things I mentioned), one of which isn't, suddenly bringing in a CGI character that looks REALLY out of place. But the movie makes room for a lot of neat stuff, like one of the few gladiatorial fight sequences I really liked (i.e. there's a purpose to it), a swords-n-axes siege, people being drained of bodily fluids in big tanks, and my favorite, one scene where someone is made to travel to the other side of the galaxy from which there's no return jump port, so it'll take "forever" (read: probably about a hundred thousand years) to get back. Usually this "quest for the ultimate power" thing does nothing for me, but at least this movie is prudent enough to make it the villain's quest, not the heroine's, and gives the heroine much more immediate motivations. The action is fast-paced, exciting and violent, sometimes kinda disturbingly violent (like the unusually high number of beings burnt into nothingness by being forced into pools of magma). Want to see a whole bunch of lizard-men get sliced in half with swords during a siege? It's here. Bitchin' score by (so far as I can figure it out) Frederic Taglorn, too, even if the hard rock soundtrack isn't quite up to snuff (more on this in a minute). The animation is something of a mixed bag; the box (at least, the Rogers' Video box) says that it's a mixture of traditional animation and CGI, and the movie starts out looking like it's going for some semi-realistic CGI backgrounds with hand-drawn characters, like with Titan A.E. but without Don Bluth's annoying character designs. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that it's almost all traditional animation, but some CGI still works its way in, never really fitting in. A lot of the humor doesn't work (loud sex dolls, and lizards having sex, aren't funny in and of themselves, and the script doesn't seem to know that), and Tyler's "When you kill someone, make sure they're dead" line comes awfully close the kind of stupid catch-phrase shit I haven't been able to stand in years - for sure, a cast far less comically capable than that of the original film surely has no little role in this. Yeah, maybe Heavy Metal 2000 could've aimed higher than it did, but I appreciated how it kept things simple and made no pretense of being The Next Great...uh, anything. (oh sure, the hype made that pretense, but it's not fair to hold a movie's hype against it) If there was one big change I'd make to this movie to make it even more bitchin', I'd sum it up in two words: heavy metal. There are a lot of hard bands on the soundtrack to this one, usually kind of shoehorning their way annoyingly into the action, and regardless of my personal preferences, the only one of them which belongs here is Monster Magnet (well, and maybe Voivod). They're the only band who, lyrically, musically, and in terms of image, really much fits in with the whole Heavy Metal (magazine) vibe. Here's a simple rule of thumb for those who might deign to make a third Heavy Metal movie: take a Heavy Metal magazine cover. The only bands that should be on the soundtrack are bands which you can easily imagine seriously considering using something like this as an album cover. The original movie had Black Sabbath and (yes!) Blue Oyster Cult. This one has System Of A Down and Slipknot. See the difference? Next time, I've got two words and a hyphen for you guys: Bal-Sagoth! I never really got into anime, mostly, I confess, because of the character design, which to these eyes, all look like children. The great leaps and bounds in breaking new ground for animation that anime has made have not escaped me, but I just can't watch it without thinking I'm watching kids, regardless of whether or not one of them has big boobs and is showering with a robot. While something like Heavy Metal 2000 isn't breaking any new ground, I find it a lot more fun to watch than the "real thing", because I don't feel like I'm watching kiddie porn during the nude scenes. I guess for me, anime is to movies what Pink Floyd is to music - I might not like the first-hand experience, but I love so much of what they influenced. Damn, I loved this movie, and I'm bouncing off the walls because I haven't been this pleasantly surprised by a movie in a long, long time. Bitchin', man. Now I've got to run off and go re-watch the original (haven't seen it in a long time); that was even more bitchin'. (in case you're thinking of counting, I'll save you the trouble: 18. And no, I'm not going to subject you to that again.) 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