Some movies are so bad that you stop watching them. Life is too short to endure consumerist rubbish that affronts art. Other movies are so bad you hate watch them. The Sharknado and God’s Not Dead series both settle into this category for many Letterboxd users, and for different reasons; perhaps it’s best to think of these as the bad movies you watch while drunk with your friends, finishing them a product of liquid fuel rather than real desire. But however you frame it, most bad movies just make you feel wasteful when you reach the end credits. This is why they feel like an eternity. Heavier Trip, a Finnish heavy metal satire and the sequel to Heavy Trip, taught this writer about another kind of bad movie: a film so bad that you watch with an intense disbelief, not because you hate it but because it’s a truly mystifying experience. It goes by in a blink. This is likely the kind of thing that Werner Herzog was talking about when he said, “I’m fascinated by trash TV. The poet must not avert his eyes.”
In Heavier Trip, the band Impaled Rektum escapes from a Norwegian prison to play at the Wacken Open Air music festival in North Germany with the intention of saving the guitarist’s dad’s slaughterhouse from the government’s agricultural policies. Yes, you read that sentence correctly… unfortunately. The band’s name is Impaled Rektum, and just like the Power Rangers they even have a team slogan: “Into the rektum.” Their juvenile name is predictably reflective of their incredibly annoying music and performances. They think they are the “hardest” band alive, but there is little actually inflammatory about their music. They bore and so does their music.
The prison they escape from has a spa and seafood buffets. Their crimes are alluded to in passing, a result of the events of the first film, which resulted in an armed conflict between Norway and Finland (which, to be clear, is just on paper better than anything we’re given in Heavier Trip). A good 50% of the runtime here basically consists of inside baseball jokes for metal fans about what counts as real metal music. Co-directed by Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, Heavier Trip is wholesale unbearable, though perhaps is releasing at the perfect time of the year— it could neatly fit into a practicing Catholic’s memento mori (Latin: “remember you must die”) rituals for November.
Speaking of the inside baseball pandering, there are several scenes that will have non-metalheads asking themselves, “What the fuck am I watching?” and for this writer, no scene engendered that response more than the scene in a random music-themed pawn shop (or museum that is for sale?) in Vilnius, Lithuania. Evading a prison guard who followed them from Norway, frontman Turo (Johannes Holopainen) spots Dave Mustaine’s hand (unattached from his body, naturally) on display, approaches it, and sucks on one of the fingers. (Mustaine, according to a quick Google search, is alive and well and still has both of his hands even after his infamous injury.) If the poet must not avert their eyes from scenes like this, the critic simply has no option — or even self-control — but to turn away.
DIRECTOR: Juuso Laatio & Jukka Vidgren; CAST: Johannes Holopainen, Max Ovaska, Chike Ohanwe, Samuli Jaskio; DISTRIBUTOR: Doppelgänger Releasing; IN THEATERS: November 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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