Heavy Metal

It turns out it's more than the greatest musical genre of all time.

I just recently watched this movie called Heavy Metal. It's really crazy. It's all done in animation in the same style as the comic book by the same name. I hadn't heard anything about this movie except that it was parodied in South Park. Little did I know that this is actually a powerful movie that evokes almost every emotion capable of man.

Its story is simple: a malevolent glowing green ball is the f

orce of all evil known as the Loc-Nar. It breaks into the house that a girl is staying in and, after trapping her in a corner, forces her to witness a number of scenarios where the Loc-Nar has corrupted and killed people. 

The bulk of the movie consists of these shorts clips accompanied by a soundtrack of fantastic heavy metal music. The short stories range widely in their topics. Futuristic cab drivers in one, medieval volcano warriors in another, world war 2 bomber plane in the next, and alien court tribunals on board a space station. Some of

 them can get pretty brutal, with lots of bloodshed. Others feature rampant sexuality. Anything goes when the Loc-Nar is involved. 

This movie is particularly amazing because sometimes the characters are corrupted by the Loc-Nar's power and are killed in the end of the story, and some other characters learn lessons and get away with greater wealth or benefit than they had before their experience with Loc-Nar. 

The episode of South Park that parodies this movie is about an epidemic of drug use - vivid hallucinations induced by cat urine. Every time one of the characters in the episode gets high, they trip out and see fantasy scenarios play out that are very similar to the stories in Heavy Metal.

Compare Kenny on board this strange looking bird with the poster for the movie. Definitely parody.

Here's a clip of one of the examples of the Loc-Nar's evil power. The clip is in spanish for some reason, but the dialogue isn't very important.