Review of Heavy Metal 2000 (2000) by Greg — 05 Aug 2008

Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to watch the sequel to yesterday's 'treat' Heavy Metal. What a great decision that was!

As poor as the original film was, at least its supreme cheesiness could perhaps be put down to its 27-year-old vintage. After all, the '80s did few people many favours stylistically, but this had no such excuse. The first movie had a fairly respectable voice cast and a degree of artistic flair behind it. This one was completely soulless with the cast consisting of aging scream queen pair-of-tits Julie Strain, preposterous '80s has-been peacock Billy Idol and um, Michael Ironside.

Yes roll up, roll up and witness the stilted wafer-thin characters, emotionless voice acting, clichéd dialogue, cringingly poor attempts at humour and anti-climatic battles. It also definitely felt like several different studios had assembled it, as whilst the backgrounds and space bits were actually rather nice, the character animation was just awful, looking like a cheap Saturday morning toy tie-in cartoon.

The soundtrack, which clawed back a sliver of dignity for the original, failed massively here. Lashings of identikit turgid SHOUTY SHOUTY grinding thrash metal, like having the TV on Channel Scuzz and your head pushed through the screen.

One thing that was confirmed for me was a classic old fantasy/sci-fi rule. That were I a 6ft tall, top-heavy amazon warrior, nothing would be more practical an attire for my final confrontation with my all-powerful nemesis than a sword, thigh boots and a thong swimsuit.