Heavy Metal
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
The fourth punch on my Thursday Thread-Up card for the 2025 season was the 1981 animated classic Heavy Metal.
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
The fourth punch on my Thursday Thread-Up card for the 2025 season was the 1981 animated classic Heavy Metal.
I have heard of Heavy Metal since I was in middle school, but I've never seen it before. If I'm being completely honest, I never really had too much interest in seeing it. I had never read or even heard of the Heavy Metal magazine/comic until very recently, and the cover of the VHS tape for this movie made me think that it was a direct-to-video tape of crudely animated barbarian women fighting and undressing to random guitar riffs. I like rock music, sword fights, and nudity as much as the next guy, but it just kind of struck me as one of those things that I might get into one night if I was really stoned and didn't have anything better to watch.
When it was first announced on the Mahoning calendar, I figured "what the hell". It's been over thirty years since I first became aware of Heavy Metal. If I didn't come out to the drive-in to see it tonight, I was probably never going to see it at all.
If there's one thing that I have learned about movies since we started going to the Mahoning Drive-In Theater, it's is to be skeptical of any opinions that you may have about a movie before you see it for yourself. I'm not saying that you should disregard the poster, the box, the trailer, the reviews, or the opinions of family and friends entirely, but don't be too quick to use any of these things as a reason to dismiss a film. Sure, you may end up "wasting" a few hours here and there on something that isn't necessarilly your cup of tea, but that price is more than worth paying for all of the excellent movies that you'll be able to enjoy and discuss with your friends that you would have missed out on.
Heavy Metal is an excellent animated film. It's an anthology movie with a half dozen different stories with another wrap-around story to tie them all together, and it features voice acting performances from John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Harold Ramis, among many others. Granted, I wasn't too far off the mark with my assumption that it involved a lot of naked cartoon ladies. In fact, I don't think there was a single female character that didn't take off their clothes, but there's so much more to Heavy Metal than that. The sci-fi elements and social commentary in Harry Canyon was brilliant. Den was hysterically funny with an excellent performance from John Candy as the title character. Captain Sternn made me think that the story was the inspiration for Zapp Brannigan. The sex robot in So Beautiful & So Dangerous would fit right in beside him. Now that I think of it, the whole movie seems like it belongs in the Futurama universe. All together, this is one of the most entertaining adult animated features that I've ever seen, and the music was incredible.
It's been raining a lot recently, but we got lucky and didn't have a drop throughout the entire movie. There was a dense fog that started to move in towards the end of the film, but we got lucky again in that the worst of it held off until after the credits rolled.
