Heavy Metal
episode list

epending on how you choose to count, there are eight or nine individual episodes that make up Heavy Metal, including an additional three minutes of footage that was originally cut from the theatrical release, but which has been reinstated on the video:

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Soft Landing

This is the animation that rolls during the opening credits. It depicts a spacecraft traversing the stars, from which a shuttle craft (a spiffy red corvette) detaches, bringing the driver planetside.

Harry Canyon

A tale with an attempt at a Mickey Spillane-type hero -- rough-cut, sawed-off and only half-bad. The hero, a hard-bitten futuristic cabby, plies his trade in an old Checker cab and holds his own against muggers and traffic via rear-mounted laser cannons and disintegration rays. When he haphazardly saves a shapely, slightly-dressed woman from danger, he finds himself up to his unshaven chin in trouble.

Grimaldi

The sequence that loosely binds the movie together. A glowing green ball -- the dreaded Loch-nar -- terrorizes a young girl, announcing that it is the embodiment of eternal evil. It declares that she will serve it, and demonstrates its might by showing her histories of other worlds in which it has had triumphs.

Den

John Candy provides the voice for the protagonist in this segment: a pre-teenaged scientist-type who is accidentally transported to another world in which he is a bald, deep-voiced action hero with about 2 percent body fat. His personal goal is to save the eternally naked Catherine (also accidentally transported from Earth), but he is forced into local politics by two rival sorcerous kingdom-cults.

Captain Sternn

Captain Sternn is on trial for every imaginable count of villainy. Although self-admittedly guilty and all but convicted, he feels he has an ace in the hole in the form of a surprise witness. Events take an unexpected turn as the witness gives damaging testimony and undergoes a strange metamorphosis.

B-17

A bomber plane limps away from a firefight, almost all its crew dead. The night sky is overcast and foreboding, and the surviving pilot and co-pilot try to assess their chances of survival. The mysterious evil green sphere that has been tailing them wreaks horrifying changes in their dead comrades, and the plane billows ominous black smoke...

So Beautiful and So Dangerous

Three spaced-zonked misfits capture a beautiful Pentagon aide and take her to their homeworld (or at least it's someplace they've been before). En route one of the trio, a would-be mechanical Casanova, proposes to the beautiful and mostly unclothed aide while the other two snort a facsimile of cocaine and try to pilot the ship.

Legend of Taarna

At 27 minutes, this is the longest segment of the movie. The evil green sphere subverts an entire culture into bestial, corpse-hued warmongers who launch an immediate attack on their neighbors. The elders of the embattled society join hands to invoke the aid of the last of a warrior-defender race. She arrives too late to prevent their destruction, but is honor-bound to avenge them.

Neverwhere

This is the segment originally cut from the film. With morphing pastel and charcoal-like sketches, the roles of evil and violence are traced from the era of prehistoric creatures through the Pleistocene and onto modern warfare and tragedy.

ack to On Screen.