[rating=7.00]
Heavy metal is the funniest shit in the world to me. And I say that as a fan of metal. There’s an inherent ridiculousness to the genre that makes it the perfect reservoir for comedic exploration. It’s so over the top, so seemingly self-serious, and so absurd that I just can’t help but laugh. For me, laughter is an important tell for whether or not I’m enjoying a band. The harder I’m laughing, the better the band tends to be.
That’s a big part of what makes Heavy Trip such a delight. This Finnish film leans into what’s hilarious about heavy metal and mines it for the purposes of top notch madcap comedy. It’s a flawed film, certainly, and often delves a bit too far into slapstick and lowbrow to be entirely meaningful, but it’s also a film with a lot of heart and charm.
Heavy Trip follows the misadventures of four outcast metal musicians chasing their heavy metal dreams in a small Finnish town. Playing what they describe as “symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal,” they are spat upon and made fun of by their fellow villagers. That finally begins to change when their lead singer Turo (Johannes Holopainen) tells his crush they’ve been booked to play the famed Northern Damnation Festival in Norway. As the news spreads their status changes from outcasts to local heroes. The only problem is they’re not really scheduled to play.
At it’s heart, Heavy Trip is a film about having the audacity to follow your dreams no matter where your momentum might take you. That’s an idea that anyone can understand, even if you’re not attuned to the world where brutality matters above all else. On that level, anyone can see and appreciate this film for what it is, even if they don’t get why corpse paint is goddamn hilarious, or even if they don’t know what corpse paint is.
Of course, being familiar with corpse paint will certainly help your appreciation of the more nuanced humor of Heavy Trip. Well, maybe “nuanced” is a strong word. Most of its comedy is overt and in your face (as slapstick silliness tends to be), though having a familiarity with metal makes things slightly more deep.
The overt silliness of Heavy Trip is far from disrespectful of metal or metalheads, however. The comedy of the film comes from a place of love, and from an understanding that metal is, at it’s core, ridiculous. This is a concept that might seem strange from the outside looking in. Lacking the firsthand knowledge of the genre, it’s easy to dismiss it as loud noise that assails the listener with violence and mayhem. But there’s a degree of kayfabe that goes into being a metal fan.
Heavy Trip understands this, and plays around in it beautifully. It’s the same reason Metalocalypse or even This is Spinal Tap worked so well. It highlights the ridiculousness without being irreverent. The comedy comes from a place of love, which makes it both respectful and adoring.
That said, if you’re not already in on the joke, maybe this is one better left unwatched. For the already initiated, however, Heavy Trip is a brutally hilarious trip into the world of heavy metal that you have to see. Lucifer commands it.
