I decided to watch this film recently after seeing "South Park" make fun of HEAVY METAL in the so-called "Cheesing" episode. Kenny and Stan's dad get high and enter the very sexually charged world of HEAVY METAL.<br /><br />I give this movie 3 stars for one reason alone--the music was exceptional, though why they included Journey's "Open Arms" along with all the harder rock, I'll never know. The tunes, if you love late 70s-early 80s hard rock, are really good. As for the rest of this film, it plays like a teenager's wet dream as animated and directed by a group of not particularly talented teens.<br /><br />The first thing that many viewers will notice will be that the animation makes the worst Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1970s look pretty good in some ways. That's because the frame-rate of HEAVY METAL is very, very low--resulting in an even jerkier and less animated style of animation. People who have given the film scores of 10 must either be blind or just could care less about super-cheap animation. Now that doesn't mean the animation is all bad--some of the backgrounds and a few of the scenes are definitely better than Hanna-Barbera--but even the best this film has to offer is light-years worse than anime, such as AKIRA. Although I saw reviews that compared the two, AKIRA is simply a much better product animation-wise or traditional full-length cartoons. Apparently the different segments were the work of different animation teams, though none were particularly good.<br /><br />Another thing you may soon notice is that although this film managed to get an R-rating, it is incredibly explicit--yet somehow this got the R and FRITZ THE CAT got an X. While the language wasn't that of FRITZ, there were tons of naked people featuring not just breasts but crotch shots and sex--lots of sex. Now I could see how a teen might like this, but for anyone wanting porn, they could also do a lot better! Seeing exceptionally explicit cartoons just seems sleazy and kinda gross.<br /><br />So what you have is a long series of short smutty stories that are horribly animated that are set to great tunes. My suggestion is that you watch the "Cheesing" episode of SOUTH PARK and see their dead-on parody of HEAVY METAL instead--it's actually funny and worth seeing--unlike this rather stupid film. I can't believe I actually watched this dumb movie.