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It's a real shame I never wrote one of these things for Heavy Metal. I wound up renting it in that brief period where I was starting to rent stuff out of morbid curiosity, but hadn't yet started sharing the horrors with this much detail. On the plus side, Heavy Metal 2000 here is likely to be WAY more lame! I should rent more sequels that replace 2 with 2000. Like, Fantasia 2000. Or Death Race 2000... although that was actually the remake and it was the remake that was just called Death Race, but still. First one is an anthology of weird shorts of varying quality, usually awful. The best segment being the John Candy voiced one about some totally dorky kid getting transported into his testosterone-fueled fantasy land because it just rings so true of some loser 13 year old narrating about turning into some badass barbarian surrounded by orcs and boobs.
OK, so we have this narration that's kinda hard to make out because there's way too gravelly a voice, now we've got a couple space miners mining in space, and discovering what I assume to be the lok-nar. The magical item of evil that kinda pretends to tie the segments of the first movie somehow. Or it's some big white crystal that causes incredible pain when you pick it up and summons an Infernal from WC3 somewhere else. Anyway, yeah, the miner who picks it up turns evil, gets longer hair, and kills his partner with a jackhammer... and OK, I thought I was joking about the infernal, but there's a big green light with a bunch of rocks floating in it, in vaguely humanoid fashion and... OK, now the light's gone and they all squished together to make some little midget golem.
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Now.. two things are coming to light that I'm not happy with. We seem to have a single coherent narrative here instead of a collection of weird shorts, and we have this nasty art style. It's like... halfway between Don Bleuth and a real cheap 80s cartoon with that French-American hybrid studio working on it. Oh and there's REALLY bad CG elements tossed in aggressively not meshing. I guess there's worse things to have than a bad space opera though. So anyway, here's some girl I gather to be the main character getting off a space ship, and here's boobs. Apparently not hers though. We're cutting to... her sister I guess, taking a shower. Meanwhile, Evil Miner killed some dudes and took over a spaceship. So now I've seen people's heads getting blown off, AND nudity in an art style that totally screams G-rated musical. I hate that sort of thing. It's the bulk of my problem with Ralph Bakshi too. If you want to be all gritty and edgy, use an appropriate art style! Or at least go so cute it's clearly part of the joke, like the South Park episode with Woodland Critter Christmas. Anyway though, the whole town is destroyed.
Yeah, maybe I should ramble less about style and more about plot here. So evil Miner is evil after finding the evil crystal, he recruited some goons by shooting random people in the head, ensuring only the most cowardly and self-serving survivors would work for him, I guess, and now he's attacking Tatooine here where the main character lives. OK, fine. It's not really Tatooine. It's more like... the planet Arizona, with some dome buildings on it. His motivation is either to find some other macguffin, or maybe just to kill people. He DOES say "Destroy all carbon based lifeforms!" which... really is an odd qualification. I guess hortas are groovy in his book. Oh and here's some orcish cyborgs with him all of the sudden. Where did they come from? I thought he just took over the one mining ship? Maybe he recruited them off camera? I guess turning evil automatically gives you the ability to recruit orcs... or maybe they happened to be on the ship. Anyway, they kidnap the main character's sister and spend a LOT of time on not raping her. Seriously there's like, 3 scenes in a row of "Oh hey, one of these survivors is a WOMAN, eh? Eh?" "No no no, leave her unharmed... for now." Meanwhile main character is surveying the destruction, and how Evil Miner used a machine gun to write either FAKKZ or maybe FAKK 2 on the wall. I'm thinking it's FAKK 2 because I could have sworn that was the subtitle of the terrible videogame tie-in this had or some reason. She also meets the token nice guy from his crew he kicked off the ship on principle.
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So... OK... apparently he invaded this planet because the natives have a chemical in their blood that makes you immortal, or at least lets you regenerate when you drink it. And he wanted to kidnap a bunch of them to get a supply of it. Which he samples with "a hint of lemon!" Oh, and every so often, pretty much at random, there's some usually lame techno-metal hybrid type music blaring in the background... and... oh hey, here's a space station with a big "Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2 logo on the side of it. You planning to explain what that stands for at any time movie, because that's... really weird. Anyway, main character and stranded dude are exploring it now, and it's like, Space New York slum. They exchange some dialog that really just seems to be totally random words, half of which are swears, and stop by some guy selling a sex robot on the street corner. Weirdly enough, it has like the exact same list of features and price tag as that one someone was publicly ridiculed for making in real life recently. What a prophetic vision of he future this movie is!
Then we cut to some strip club, apparently also on this space station, with plenty of random strippers and such, like this girl here with 6 boobs, but for some reason Evil Miner picks some random not stripperiffic girl to just kinda rape in public. The main character sees this though, and in bad slow motion pulls out a gattling gun and totally blows him away. Well, that was a short movie! OK, he gets up just fine and drinks some immortality juice and then a gun fight breaks out. Main character pulls out 2 pistols and hides behind a table. So hey, it's like a sci-fi version of Black Lagoon! Except that Black Lagoon isn't terrible! Actually, now I have to wonder, IS this by the same people who these days keep doing all those terrible animated tie-ins to stuff like Chronicles of Riddick and Dead Space? It really does seem to have that same mix of mediocrity and failing to be edgy. Oh hey, here's rape scene fakeout #4.
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Really, this is just SAD. I mean, this is clearly people trying to make some horribly depraved pure id movie of just gratuitous sex and violence with no plot at all set to a heavy metal soundtrack, but they're too chicken to actually go through with it, so we've just got an hour and a half people being worried that there will be sex and discretionary cutaways from violence... set to bad knockoffs of Rage Against the Machine. Now, don't get me wrong, if they actually DID have the balls to go through with it, this would still be completely terrible, but at least it would be terrible for being terrible, rather than for wasting my time. I'll take being offended over being bored with this kind of garbage, you know? Like Tokyo Gore Police? That was freaking great. I may have lasting mental scars but it's all pretty much worth it for the hand gun scene. When this is over, all I'll ultimately be left with is the knowledge that I wasted 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back watching and rambling about such a piece of garbage. The animation's cheap too.
Oh hey! It's that midget golem again! And did this robed guy he's named Odin? The hell? For that matter, Main Character just gave her name for the firs time. Evidently it's Julie... which does not work as a tough action girl name. That's almost as bad as calling your Sephiroth clone Lloyd. Oh, and you know what's a WAY better sequel to Heavy Metal than this movie? That one episode of South Park. Kenny gets high off cat urine fumes and spends the whole episode hallucinating a Heavy Metal spoof. They go with hand drawn animation for it and everything. And oh hey, here's a bunch of low tech lizard men fighting to death in an arena in a cave. That's not boredom inducing. And here's Evil Miner jumping in and challenging them to fights because uh... he's bored I guess?
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Now Main Character to cross a lake of lava because, plot? But to find out how to get across, there's some big ugly troll who says he'll only tell her if she gives him a KISS. So... this movie was written by 12 year olds, is that it? You're trying to recapture the appeal of the John Candy segment of Heavy Metal by getting an actual 12 year old to write your movie? Also... Evil Miner is named Tylor? Again these names SUCK! Anyway yeah, the whole kiss thing? After she kisses the big ugly troll, Odin and Mini-Golem are all "Uh, what the heck are you doing over there? There's a boat right here..." which is a gag that'd work a whole lot better if this wasn't a big open wasteland with a clear lack of giant freaking gondola last time you had the camera pointed that way... and when did her shirt get so torn up?
So... now Main Character is planning to kill the badguy by walking into his room in lizard man town, where, again, he's just hanging out killing time apparently, wearing a totally transparent top and skirt, by seducing him and then killing him. Uh, that's Main Character wearing the non-clothes if that wasn't clear. At the last second though (after a lot of Badguy drooling all over Main Character's nipples... that's what sex is right?) Mini-Golem comes in and says wait, you can't kill him and hauls her away. Because... plot? You get how every time I say "plot" I mean they don't bother to explain it, right? Oh, and after all this, she's back in her ripped clohes for the next scene. What's with that? If your clothes get all shredded, and you change out of them, you don't change back into them after. Actually, heck, even if they weren't ripped, did you take the time to do the laundry between these scenes? You should have another set of clothes around on your spaceship or something.
So yeah, they leave and go to the bad guy's spaceship where she rescues her sister from... actually it isn't almost-rape this time, just getting more immortality juice sucked out. There isn't really a scene for it though, she just kinda walks in, grabs her, and leaves. And the whole place gets set on fire somehow. Now Odin is narrating about some kinda plot but he's kinda mumbly. The one bit I did get though is that the ancients left their immortality juice in Main Character's planets water table, so all the natives have been drinking it and that's why baddie is sucking immortality juice out of Sister, the only person besides Main Character to survive his assault on Planet Arizona. So... uh... how did he kill all the people who were drinking the immortal juice? The immortal juice that he drank a tiny bit of once and it let him survive being totally swiss cheesed and cut in half and set on fire?
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Anyway, NOW for no reason whatsoever I can see, a couple of robed dudes from Odin's group are stripping and fondling the main character so she can be naked while swimming across this lake, so she can grab the sword and uh... "armor" over there. They don't explain this as some weird ritual or trap or anything. It's just totally gratuitous nudity for no reason. Then she puts on the most horrible outfit I've ever scene outside of a fighting game, again, I don't know why... and now she's defending Minas Tirath from the army of lizard men. Hey, remember those cyborg orcs this guy had as goons before? Because apparently they don't. After that one scene they never showed up again. So anyway yeah, we've got this big fantasy siege going on here in what has to this point been a strictly bad generic sci-fi movie. Why? I guess this is the fortress defending the fountain of better immortality than just drinking immortality juice? Defended by a couple monks with bows and swords? Which they have to fight off space cruisers and dudes with grenades and gatling guns and stuff? This movie doesn't so much have a plot as a bunch of scenes someone thought would look cool following each other in no particular order. Oh yeah, and while Main Character dresses like a total slut, Bad Guy is cosplaying as The Punisher.
Also, turns out after the big climactic battle that Odin is secretly a Draconian or a Protoss or something. He ripped off his cloakk to reveal a REALLY bad CGI model and gave a villain speech. So he runs off to do something or other, but Mini-Golem yanked the crystal of plot out of the thing before he could which makes the sacred temple not do whatever and Odin gets trapped inside. Oh and Mini-Golem gets sucked up into the sky because he didn't let go of the thing. And... that's it I guess. You know, I'm willing to watch these movies, is it really too much to ask that the people who make them put SOME effort into them? You don't have to succeed but you can at least try people. I really hate these apathetic pieces of garbage.
So hey. Let's point some fingers! The first name to really jump out at me in the credits here is rather interesting. Carl Macek. The guy who everyone hates for ruining a bunch of anime in the 80's and 90's. You'd kinda figure he'd know better than to bring about this sort of slop. Although the actual animation it turns out was a joint effort between Canada and Germany. Which I guess it looks kinda like that American-French animation but too cute... there's some national pride joke here but I'm too lazy to make it. Anyway though yeah, that was some pretty tepid garbage.
