HM 2000 is a fairly good animated movie similar to TITAN A.E. I'm 35 and remember seeing the original HEAVY METAL in 81 and I have stacks of the magazines. I searched through pawn shops till I found a bootleg tape years before it was released. It's one of my favorites. At the theater where I used to work, HEAVY METAL was as popular as ROCKY HORROR at the midnight movies. I wouldn't want my children to watch it, as it was filled with sardonic humor, sarcasm, sex, drug use (nosedive!) and violence. I wouldn't mind my children watching HM2000 as it isn't much worse than what's on t.v. these days. And therein lies the rub, the magazine is not for all ages, and neither was the original movie. Granted, the story could have been a story in HM magazine and is, but the fans expected it to be more like the original. The Rerelease of the original was touted "louder and nastier than ever" and the fans flocked to see it, including a new generation of fans that had heard about the legendary film. The video tapes sold like hot cakes, nearly everyone I know owns a copy. Now supposedly, Kevin Eastman and associates had been working on the new movie for close to 8 years. It was chosen to be one story, instead of an anthology. That's fine if the consensus is that the story is fantastic. Unlike the original, they didn't pick the best stories from the magazine and then bring them to life. Eastman decided it would be cool to use his wife, the beautiful model and actress, Julie Strain as the model for the lead character. Cool, so far so good. Hype showed Julie in skimpy costumes wielding huge swords and submachine guns. Royo and Bisley had done numerous paintings of this Xena, Red Sonja, and Rambo all rolled into one, bad-ass warrior woman. Obviously, she was to be bigger and tougher than Taarna from the original. From Bisley's MELTING POT, the comic on which it was loosely based, one would expect massive battle fields with hand to hand combat, something like the fighting in GLADIATOR, THE 13th WARRIOR, BRAVEHEART, or SOLDIER only nastier and meaner. One would have expected villains unrivaled in their cruelty and violence, villains so vile that your blood pressure would have risen whenever they were on screen. To balance this one would expect lots of humor to flavor the story. The best movies are filled with humor even if the movie is fairly serious like AMERICAN BEAUTY or SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. One would have expected lots of black humor, wise cracks and humorous situations. After all, they had 20 years to come up with a great story and a library of over 100 issues of HM that they had the legal right to use. One would have expected hot, sexy, little honeys that would have made you wish you were a cartoon, Julie Strain had done raunchy adult layouts for Earl Miller that were published in PENTHOUSE wearing the FAKK2 outfit. You would have expected this to have been one bloody, raunchy, sexy movie with a HEAVY METAL soundtrack. Would you go to a movie entitled HEAVY METAL to hear Rap or New Age or Grindcore or any other kind of music. I thought not. It does not suck because it is a bad movie, it is a relatively o.k. movie. It sucks because of what it could have been. Lastly, the decision to go cable t.v. first and then straight to video was noble, because they realized the fans would be disappointed, but stupid. We wanted to see it on the big screen. It would have earned 100 million easy. I know you don't believe me but there are LOTS of Heavy Metal fans out here and it would have. You literally threw MILLIONS of dollars away and the fans would have liked the opportunity to have seen it on the big screen even if it sucked. I know I would have and I would have been first in line for the first screening and paid my 6 bucks and all of that. My suggestion is to redeem yourselves by making a BADASS Heavy Metal 3 and go all digital, it's easier and it looks better.
