Trailer
Plot summary
Something green rides home in an astronaut's case and rises out in front of his daughter. It melts him, then tells the girl it is the sum of all evils and holds her with tales it claims to have shaped. In a crime-ridden New York of 2031, a cab driver rescues a woman the gangster Rudnick is hunting. A teenager lands in Neverwhere and becomes the muscular Den. The crooked Captain Lincoln F. Sternn faces trial on a space station. A crippled wartime bomber carries its dead and the orb. Aliens snatch a Pentagon stenographer and a malfunctioning android. A mute warrior, the last of the Taarakians, is summoned to a city of scholars.
Cast
- Caroline Sempleas Girl (segment "Grimaldi") (voice)
Show all 20 cast
- Glenis Wootton Grossas Whore (segment "Harry Canyon") (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Heavy Metal (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Legal difficulties over some of the songs delayed the film's release to home media, because the production company had licensed them only for the theatrical release and soundtrack. An official VHS release came in 1996 only after Kevin Eastman, who had bought the magazine's publishing rights in 1992, reached a settlement with the music copyright holders.
- Kevin Eastman spent five years and a significant amount of his own money untangling the film's music licensing conflicts so that it could be re-released, lobbying executives at Columbia Pictures who reluctantly agreed to help just to stop receiving phone calls and visits from him.
- Blue Öyster Cult wrote and recorded a song called “Vengeance (The Pact)” for the film, but the producers declined to use it because the lyrics provided a capsulized summary of the “Taarna” vignette.
- In 2018 Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit with an astronaut mannequin in the driver's seat and cameras mounted to capture the driver's side and front views; news reports noted the imitation of Heavy Metal's “Soft Landing” segment.
- The initial script had Arzach as the framing device for the film, but it was thrown out after Jean Giraud refused to allow the usage of his characters, and Len Blum and Daniel Goldberg created Taarna and a green orb instead.
- Michael Mills was hired to create the opening and closing segments, but script rewrites had the sequences redrawn multiple times. Reitman, displeased with the high expenses, withheld payment; Mills sued, the case was settled out of court, and Reitman hired Jimmy T. Murakami to create a new opening.
- The film's home video release was the first animated film issued on the VHS format to be THX-certified, and it moved more than one million units.
