• Today’s Movie: Heavy Metal
• Year of Release: 1981
• Stars: Richard Romanus, John Candy, Joe Flaherty (voices)
• Director: Gerald Potterton, John Bruno, John Halas

This movie is not on my list of essential films.

NOTE: This installment of Sports Analaogies Hidden in Classic Movies is not being done as part of a blog-a-thon.  Instead, this is a monthly event hosted by MovieRob called Genre Grandeur.  The way it works is every month MovieRob chooses a film blogger to pick a topic and a movie to write about, then also picks a movie for MovieRob to review.  At the end of the month, MovieRob posts the reviews of all the participants.

For March 2025, the honor of being the “guest picker” went to Darren of Movie Reviews 101! and the topic is “Movies Featuring Aliens.”

The Story:

Heavy Metal is a 1981 animated sci-fi/fantasy production that is quite simply one of the most unique viewing experiences one could possibly have. The film is a series of vignettes linked by a common theme of one force in the universe which is “the sum of all evils.”

That alone sets it apart, but it’s melange of graphic violence and sexuality wrapped around pulsing rock music gives it a feel of what MTV “After Dark” could have been like. That’s no accident considering the two debuted six days apart in 1981, and the similarity is cemented in the film’s soundtrack.

Something else which makes this film stand out visually is the fact that in order to expedite production, several different animation firms were employed simultaneously.

1) Soft Landing

The opening sequence starts with a Space Shuttle orbiting Earth. It releases a vintage Corvette driven by an astronaut who takes it back to Earth, landing in a desert canyon.

2) Grimaldi

Named for the astronaut Grimaldi, this scene introduces the viewer to the aforementioned “sum of all evils.” While being greeted by his daughter upon arriving home, Grimaldi opens a case from which a glowing orb rises. Known as the Loc-Nar, the orb melts Grimaldi. But as the girl peers into it, Grimaldi’s daughter sees it’s true power.

3) Harry Canyon

This scene is set in 2031 in a dystopian and crime-ridden New York City. Harry Canyon is a street-hardened cab driver who offers a noir-esque narration of his daily adventures. As such, he finds himself coming to the rescue of red-haired young woman from a gangster who murdered her father. She tells Harry that her father discovered the Loc-Nar, and ever since they have been on the run eluding all those who want it. She then decides to sell the Loc-Nar to the gangster and split the money with Harry. However, things don’t go according to plan. The Loc-Nar disintegrates the gangster at the exchange, and the mysterious redhead attempts to double-cross Harry…only to find out how well-equipped Harry is to handle a robbery. Getting all the money to himself, Harry chalks up this adventure as a “two-day ride with one hell of a tip.”

4) Den

Now, the Loc-Nar appears near the home of nerdy teenage rock collector, who naturally finds the green meteorite curious. As a result, it transports him to the world of Neverwhere, where our rock collector morphs into a superhero-type named Den…which is an acronym for his real name, David Ellis Norman. In Neverwhere, Den witnesses a ceremony where a young woman is about to be sacrificed. He rescues her, after which she introduces herself as Katherine Wells from the British colony of Gibraltar.

The introduction is interrupted by Ard, an immortal man who wants the Loc-Nar for himself. Den fights off Ard and his soldiers, only to discover Ard has Katherine under a spell from which only he can awaken her. Ard tells Den he will take the Loc-Nar in exchange for the girl. But that means Den must get it from the Queen; he agrees and enters the castle along with Ard’s best soldier, Norl. The two are immediately caught; as a result the queen issues demands of her own. While Den is “distracting” the Queen, Nori absconds with the Loc-Nar. Later, Den rescues Katherine

Den then uses the Loc-Nar to banish Ard and the Queen, but afterward refuses to keep the Loc-Nar for himself. Instead, Den and Katherine ride off into the Neverwhere sunset, while the Loc-Nar it rises into space.

5) Captain Sternn

The Loc-Nar finds it’s way to a space station where Captain Lincoln F. Sternn is on trial for numerous serious charges, including murder, armed robbery, piracy, rape, and fraud. Despite the seriousness of the charges, Sternn is confident of being acquitted because he bribed the main witness against him; a man named Hanover Fiste. However when Fiste takes the stand, the Loc-Nar forces him to utter statements which are highly incriminating of Sternn. Then the Loc-Nar transforms Fiste into a menacing hulk who smashes his way through the space station in pursuit of Sternn. Once he corners Sternn, he elicits his promised pay-off, after which Fiste returns to his scrawny self. Sternn then opens a trap door under Fiste which hurls him into space, and the Loc-Nar plummets to Earth with Fiste’s flaming, severed hand still clinging to it.

6) Neverwhere Land

This is a “bonus” scene only available on certain releases. For whatever reason, it does serve to connect Captain Sternn to B-17. It was intended to show the influence of the Loc-Nar upon the evolution of a planet. The original animation is set to a loop of Pink Floyd’s Time and follows the Loc-Nar’s arrival on earth through it’s influence on an industrial revolution and a world war.

7) B-17

Flashing to the Second World War, a B-17 bomber nicknamed the Pacific Pearl suffers heavy damage during a difficult mission; all of the crew except for the pilot and co-pilot are killed. When the co-pilot discovers the fate of the crew, he notices the Loc-Nar is following the plane. Shortly afterward, it attacks the bomber and reanimates the dead crew members as zombies. Only the pilot escapes by parachute, landing on an island which is little more than a graveyard of warplanes and their zombified crews.

8 ) So Beautiful & So Dangerous

Dr. Anrak is a prominent scientist who has been summoned to The Pentagon to discuss a series of mutations plaguing the country. As he begins the discussions, he spots a locket around the neck of Gloria, a beautiful and amply-endowed secretary. The Loc-Nar also happens to be in the locket.

When Anrak sees the Loc-Nar, he begins to behave erratically as a gigantic spaceship abducts him and Gloria. On board, we discover that Anrak is actually a malfunctioning android whose mood is somehow affected by Gloria. Meanwhile, the ship’s pilots Edsel and Zeke snort a huge amount of a powdered drug called Plutonian Nyborg before flying home. As expected, since they are intoxicated, they crash unharmed into a huge space station.

9) Taarna

Now having assumed the size of a of a giant meteor, the Loc-Nar crashes into a volcano on a distant planet; the spectacle drawing a huge crowd. As the crowd scales the mountain, it erupts covering the crowd in a thick green slime which mutates them into an evil barbarian army. Subsequently, they swarm a nearby city of peaceful scholars. Needing help, the city leaders summon the Taarakians, a once powerful warrior race now in decline, but the mutant army overruns the city before help can arrive.

However, the last of the Taarakians still prepares to come to the city’s aid. A beautiful and mute warrior, Taarna goes to the city only to find all of it’s inhabitants have been killed. Taarna decides to avenge their deaths, but is captured after an initial encounter with a small part of the mutant army.

Taarna is tortured and thrown into a pit, but is rescued thanks to her mount. She attempts to capture the Loc-Nar, but the mutants aren’t having it. The mutant leader squares off with Taarna in a duel to the death, with Taarna emerging victorious, albeit wounded. Despite this, Taarna makes her way to the volcano. As she approaches, the Loc-Nar tries to warn her away by claiming that sacrificing herself serves no purpose. But she ignores the admonition, dives into the volcano and destroys the Loc-Nar.

10) Epilogue

The story comes full circle as the destruction of the Loc-Nar allows Grimaldi’s daughter to have the soul of Taarna reincarnated within her. Taarna’s reborn mount appears beside here, and together they fly off, completing her transformation into a new Taarakian.

The Hidden Sports Analogy:

All too often, thing that end up being destructive come to us in he guise of something cool. Just look at the Loc-Nar from this film. What’s cooler than an astronaut driving a vintage Corvette out of a space shuttle?

In the sports world, the “Loc-Nar” was not only hidden in the “cool” of the technology, it was given a sense of urgency as the solution to a problem.

The sports world’s Loc-Nar appears over Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium on January 6^th, 1980 during the AFC Championship game. With a trip to the Super Bowl on the line, it certainly appeared as though the Houston Oilers’ Mike Renfroe caught what would have been a pivotal touchdown. But the referees blew the call, the Oilers eventually lost, and the call for instant replay in sports began. While it took years for the glowing green orb to hover over the green fields of the National Football League (NFL), the “sum of all evils” was coming.

The problem it was an evil hidden by the collective bleat “we’ve got to get the call right.” The NFL first adopted a limited instant replay system in 1986 and permanently implemented it in 1999. Since then, the league’s use of instant replay has been a never-ending series of “tweaks” to address an equally infinite supply of evils.

First of all, what using instant replay to assist referees did to the television viewing experience was criminal…and the NFL is painfully aware of this. But embracing the power of the Loc-Nar also means being enslaved by it.

That problem is magnified in the stadium. On TV, replays delays just mean three more minutes of beer commercials. But if you’re sitting on the 40-yard line in December in places like Chicago, New York. or Green Bay, that’s just more time out in the elements. Multiply that by umpteen times a game, and both examples aren’t great for fans…especially for the ones who paid handsomely to get into an NFL game. Perhaps that’s why there’s becoming less and less of them, but that’s for another time.

The worst part is the the NFL’s Loc-Nar doesn’t even meet it’s original requirement “getting the call right.” Ever since it’s implementation, the NFLs’ use of instant replay has been a spiraling cycle of fixing a problem, having, the law of unintended consequences create a new issue, which then needs to be addressed…rinse, lather, repeat. That how we have a league plagued with terrible officiating inasmuch as replay allowed for stupidly complex rules which are easy get wrong (“Catch, not a catch” anybody?) relying on a flawed system, and whose resulting explanations sound more like a Supreme Court decision rather than a ruling on a football game.

As much of a double-edged sword as instant replay is, the NFL simply can’t get out of it’s own spiral.

The Moral of the Story:

The solution must never be worse than the problem.

---

Got a question, comment, or just want to yell at us? Hit us up at  dubsism@yahoo.com, @Dubsism on Twitter, or on our Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, or Facebook pages, and be sure to bookmark Dubsism.com so you don’t miss anything from the most interesting independent sports blog on the web.