Sophmoric, misogynistic, violent, and incredibly influential, this Canadian animated feature based on the science fiction magazine and featuring comedians from SCTV is equal parts terrible and awesome, and really brings out our inner teenage dirtbags.
Also, we look at Richard Corben’s original animated short Neverwhere, the basis for the comic book character Den and his segment of the film.
Starring John Candy, Rodger Bumpass, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, and more. Written by Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum. Directed by Gerald Potterton. Based on original stories by Richard Corben, Angus McKie, Dan O’Bannon, and a really unimpressed and uncredited Jean “Moebius” Giraud.
Welcome to the Mary Versus the Movies newsletter! We’ve been very, very busy.
This week: 10/?/2024
So we’ve really fallen behind with this newsletters, huh? We apologize for that. There are several reasons for that, including a pretty grueling time at our day jobs that has sucked up a lot of our mental space, and a family wedding we had to travel to out in St. Louis for several days. So while we kept up with putting out episodes, we haven’t had the time to sit and work on the newsletter, between writing reviews of the films (however short), or Dennis’s comics, or the pizza reviews. And as the year winds down, we enter our busy period at work, so I can’t promise this won’t happen again between now and January. But rest assured, I feel very, very guilty about all of this. J
Also! Dennis has slightly redesigned our logo, adding Reggie as our mascot in the center (and getting rid of the obvious copyright infringement that was a Transformers drawing); we’ll have a banner ready soon.
MARY VS THE MOVIES
EPISODE 158 – HEAVY METAL (1981)/NEVERWHERE (1969)
Sophomoric, misogynistic, violent, and incredibly influential, this Canadian animated feature based on the science fiction magazine Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant and featuring comedians from the sketch show SCTV is equal parts terrible and awesome, and really brings out our inner teenage dirtbags.
I can’t say this is a good movie—some of the segments are pretty flat, especially when trying to be funny; no amount of Canadian comedy legends can elevate some tired drug humor or casual misogyny. But other elements work surprisingly well, especially “Harry Canyon” based on the influential Dan O’Bannon/Moebius comic The Long Tomorrow, “Den” (see below) and “Taarna”, based on Moebius’s Arzach comic. The segments span cyberpunk, horror, fantasy, and some very silly sci-fi, and more than once we found ourselves surprised at how very influential a not-well-regarded film can be—everything from The Fifth Element to He-Man to Elon Musk shooting a car into space can be traced back to this movie.
Also, we look at Richard Corben’s original animated short Neverwhere, the basis for the comic book character Den and his segment of the film. Heavily influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series, it’s the story of a nerdy young man who receives a set of instructions from space (in a scene which really must have influenced George Lucas’s ideas of Princess Leia’s instructions on R2D2), which helps him build a teleportation device to another world. Once there, he is physically transformed into a powerful figure (who looks like a purple Yul Brenner), able to rescue and seduce women and possess powerful weapons like the Locnar. It’s a very adolescent fantasy, one Corben didn’t invent, but this early work has some interesting seeds we later see developed into Heavy Metal.
And most important of all, there’s music. For something called “Heavy Metal”, there isn’t a whole lot of metal. I mean, come on: Don Felder? Donald Fagen? Journey? There’s more heavy metal in my tap water. There are two Cheap Trick songs and two from DEVO, who actually appear in the “Taarna” segment as the band in a space biker bar—I love both bands, but you would hardly call them metal. Still, we do get some Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult.
Starring John Candy, Rodger Bumpass, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, and more. Written by Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum. Directed by Gerald Potterton. Based on original stories by Richard Corben, Angus McKie, Dan O’Bannon, and a really unimpressed and uncredited Jean “Moebius” Giraud.
EPISODE 159 – STREETS OF FIRE (1984)
A biker gang kidnaps an ex-soldier’s rock star girlfriend, and he gets revenge through the power of Jim Steinman power ballads and giant hammers in a very silly “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fable” from the guy who gave us The Warriors.
Like Heavy Metal, I don’t know that this is a good film exactly, though there’s a lot to like about it. Most of the problems can be laid at the feet of its star, Michael Paré, who is utterly lacking in charisma, especially when up against the weird alchemy of Willem Dafoe’s slithery biker, who plays his role as though Marlon Brando’s Wild Ones character was a homoerotic demon.
Starring Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Willem Dafoe, Rick Moranis, and Amy Madigan. Written by Walter Hill and Larry Gross. Directed by Walter Hill. Music by Jim Steinman, Ry Cooder, and others.
EPISODE 160 – WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988)
An L.A. private eye investigating the murder of a local businessman uncovers a corrupt world of sex, money, and violence. Also, every major American cartoon character from the 20th century shows up at some point. Heavily influenced by films like Chinatown and The Big Sleep and featuring special effects that fully realize the potential of earlier films like Anchors Away and Mary Poppins that mix live acting and animation, this might be the greatest film of the 1980s.
This episode is a little bit of a cheat–we’ve both seen this film many, many times, but we needed a fill-in episode, and as this was playing in a theater near us this summer, we jumped at the chance to cover it.
Starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloydd, Charles Fleischer, Kathleen Turner, Joanna Cassidy, and Stubby Kaye. Directed by Robet Zemeckis. Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman.
BONUS – THE SPACE MELT POWER HOUR
We go to the Space Melt Power Hour in Philadelphia, and talk a little about the Philly movie scene.
The Power Hour is a super-cut of sixty films, with each clip being sixty seconds long. Everything from recent Japanese horror to the 1941 musical Hellzapoppin to instructional videos are edited together in brief segments, which is followed by the command “drink” (no shots of liquor were allowed, only beer and soft drinks). It’s mostly an excuse to curate, to expose people to new films in a different way, and it was quite a lot of fun, reminding me a little of Joe Dante’s famous student film project The Movie Orgy.
Thanks to Bruce Bohri and the people at Space 1026 for hosting the movie night.
HOLLWOOD AVALON – MERLIN: THE DRAGON’S CALL (2008)
This month, we check out the pilot for the British t.v. show Merlin from 2008, which rewrites the Arthurian story in some pretty significant ways, some of which really rub us the wrong way. Why is Merlin so young? Why is Arthur living with Uther? And why does the dragon look so terrible?
We know a lot of people really enjoyed this show, and pilots of course are often uneven, but I really couldn’t quite get into this one. Maybe it’s my dislike of teen-oriented t.v. shows, maybe it’s the cheap mid-Aughts production, maybe it’s the way it plays too fast and loose with Arthurian lore in the service of making a show that looks too much like that heartthrob Robin Hood show or Torchwood, both from the same time period.
Well, anyway, everyone is mad at me for this one, and you’re all wrong.
Starring Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Angel Coulby, Anthony Head, Richard Wilson, and John Hurt. Written by Julian Jones. Directed by James Hawes.
What else are we up to this week?
Mary: Not a whole lot! Like I said, we’ve been too busy with work and family stuff to do much of anything. I have seen the first episode of The Penguin, which I enjoyed a lot, even if it’s very weird to watch Colin Farrell spend the whole time talking and looking like an Aldi’s Tony Soprano. Still, if you can accept that this is Sopranos cosplay set in Gotham, the pilot is really, really fun, and I hope I get to catch up with the rest of it soon.
I also finally started season four of Only Murders in the Building, happy to get back to my little murder mystery comedy. Also, I hope they never acknowledge that Oliver is played by Martin Short, who presumably exists in the same universe as Eugene Levy, since they were on SCTV together.
Dennis:
NEXT EPISODE: We welcome back Alana Phelan, who brings us the made-for-tv failed pilot Nick Knight about a vampire cop, starring Rick Springfield.
Follow Us:
Twitter: @maryvsmovies
Instagram: @maryvsmovies
Threads: @maryvsmovies
Bluesky: @maryvsmovies
Mastodon: @maryvsmovies@mas.to
TikTok: @maryvsmovies
Tumblr: https://at.tumblr.com/maryversusthemovies
Letterboxd:
https://letterboxd.com/tlachtga/
Support the Patreon! www.patreon.com/maryvsmovies
Mary vs the Movies 