I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later and not a day goes by that this movie doesn't cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares, there's animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, "Soft Landing" starts the film. Created by Dan O'Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man fly a car from space to Earth. He's an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, "Grimaldi," what he has brought back kills him and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius' "The Long Tomorrow" has become "Harry Canyon," the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In "Den," based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone on the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and become a superheroic character that everyone wants to either get in their bed or put in the dirt. For me, this is the center of this movie and other than the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that's John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson's "Captain Sternn" follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty of a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called "Neverwhere Land" was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and would have been a loop set to either Pink Floyd's "Time" or Krzysztof Penderecki 's "Magnificat: Passacaglia."

The zombie segment with the haunted "B-17" is next, followed by an adaption of Angus McKie's "So Beautiful, So Dangerous," a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on "Arzach" by Moebius, "Taarna" and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn in the young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie - that kept it from legally being released for years - is amazing. There's everything from Black Sabbath's "Mob Rules" and "Prefabricated" by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult's "Veterans of Psychic Wars." The band originally wrote the song "Vengeance (The Pact)," but the makers of the film thought it too closely told the story of the segment. Both songs appeared on BÖC's Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever that ended up being aired on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

I decided to watch this film recently after seeing "South Park" make fun of HEAVY METAL in the so-called "Cheesing" episode. Kenny and Stan's dad get high and enter the very sexually charged world of HEAVY METAL.

I give this movie 3 stars for one reason alone--the music was exceptional, though why they included Journey's "Open Arms" along with all the harder rock, I'll never know. The tunes, if you love late 70s-early 80s hard rock, are really good. As for the rest of this film, it plays like a teenager's wet dream as animated and directed by a group of not particularly talented teens.

The first thing that many viewers will notice will be that the animation makes the worst Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1970s look pretty good in some ways. That's because the frame-rate of HEAVY METAL is very, very low--resulting in an even jerkier and less animated style of animation. People who have given the film scores of 10 must either be blind or just could care less about super-cheap animation. Now that doesn't mean the animation is all bad--some of the backgrounds and a few of the scenes are definitely better than Hanna-Barbera--but even the best this film has to offer is light-years worse than anime, such as AKIRA. Although I saw reviews that compared the two, AKIRA is simply a much better product animation-wise or traditional full-length cartoons. Apparently the different segments were the work of different animation teams, though none were particularly good.

Another thing you may soon notice is that although this film managed to get an R-rating, it is incredibly explicit--yet somehow this got the R and FRITZ THE CAT got an X. While the language wasn't that of FRITZ, there were tons of naked people featuring not just breasts but crotch shots and sex--lots of sex. Now I could see how a teen might like this, but for anyone wanting porn, they could also do a lot better! Seeing exceptionally explicit cartoons just seems sleazy and kinda gross.

So what you have is a long series of short smutty stories that are horribly animated that are set to great tunes. My suggestion is that you watch the "Cheesing" episode of SOUTH PARK and see their dead-on parody of HEAVY METAL instead--it's actually funny and worth seeing--unlike this rather stupid film. I can't believe I actually watched this dumb movie.

Heavy Metal is understandably a movie that people are going to love or hate. I personally found it a decent, if not great, one. It does have a number of problems. A lot of the segments have stories and morals that for me lacked coherency, So Beautiful and So Dangerous was the one that was the most problematic in this area. And as beautiful as it looked, I didn't really see the point of the Soft Landing sequence either. Some of the character designs looked rather flat which may make the film rather dated by today's standards, again the weakest were in So Beautiful and So Dangerous. Most of the characters work very well actually, especially Den, Captain Stermn and Harry Canyon- Loknar is also intriguing but not developed enough- but others like the female from So Beautiful and So Dangerous get on your nerves. The humour gave me a mixed reception, Harry Canyon, Captain Stermn and Den did work very well in this respect however apart from some moments So Beautiful and So Dangerous comes across as juvenile, in fact the only thing that stood out to me in that segment was the voice acting. On the plus side, the animation on the most part was very good, not the best I've seen but acceptable enough for when it was made, Taarna was by far the best-looking sequence, so sweeping and lush. The soundtrack is superb, the songs are the epitome of killer and the musical score itself is powerful. The graphic violence is unrelenting and quite disturbing, most evocative was B-17, my personal favourite segment of the entire film because of how creepy and atmospheric it turned out to be. Harry Canyon is thoroughly enjoyable, only let down by a rather underwhelming ending, you do have a feeling you know how Captain Stermn is going to end but the memorable titular character and wonderful humour really carry it wonderfully while Taarna is the most visually beautiful of the segments. Den is highly effective also. The voice acting from Richard Romanus, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis and especially John Candy is spot on. Overall, enjoyable but Heavy Metal is a wildly uneven film to me. 6/10 Bethany Cox