| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: August 7, 1981 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
5
Mixed:
3
Negative:
5
|
Watch Now
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
For anyone who doesn't think an hour and a half is a long time to spend with a comic book, Heavy Metal is impressive. Though it owes some slight bit of its toughness and nihilism to Ralph Bakshi, this animated feature is off on its own track, combining science fiction, mysticism, sex, violence and rock music. Much of the time, these elements do what the film makers want them to, and make for a heady mix.
Read full review
The film never transcends the racist, sexist, neofascist implications of its base material, but it works entertainingly within them, and even manages a bit of auto-analysis in John Candy's ironic, adolescent narration of the "Den" episode. Better than it had to be, for which some honor is due.
Read full review
The movie, like the magazine, contains a mixture of inspired graphics and hollow content. [10 Aug 1981]
Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class
of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose
nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to
the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen-
agers. [7 Aug 1981]
Heavy Metal is the bummer version of "Star Wars," an expression of adolescent revenge against the world. What gives the movie its thoroughly unpleasant integrity is the suspicion it arouses that the guys who dreamed this stuff up mean business. If only they'd saved it for their shrinks. [10 Aug 1981, p.69]
Fantasies that are gratuitously sexist and Fascist (macho whoring and warmongering), and whose roots reach all the way back to post-hippie paranoia, feed the tangled plot-lines of a movie that, given the orchestral overkill and surprisingly low profile of heavy metal music, should disappoint even the teenage wet-dreamers it's aimed at.
Read full review
Like "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Heavy Metal makes most sense as a midnight weekend feature, when many of its viewers are likely to be herbally and chemically addled. Without the help of intoxicants, Heavy Metal comes across as what it is - a wildly sophomoric and stupid cartoon celebrating gore, rape and bad music.
Read full review
Heavy Metal is one of the worst ideas ever to be translated into a movie. [8 Aug 1981, p.C10]
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
