Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar (2023)
Only a god can kill another god.
I’ve had a week. Hard drive troubles have left me currently devoid of most the software I use for projects, and all the backups of images and audio files I’ve put on this site for the last 8 years. On the one hand, it really lets you reflect on just how long you’ve been doing something when you see how much that is, but then the foot comes up and kicks you in the guts when the possibility of it being gone forever exists. That being the case and left to my own devices to choose a movie tonight, I had thought about going the horror route I’ve visited many a time - some aggravating deplorable human race getting wiped out by what should be seen as a evil entity but instead almost comes off as a hero? Great for bad moods! Instead, I cam across a name that I remember and haven’t seen in a long time - Metalocalypse. We all need a little song in our lives, and sometimes that song is absolutely brutal and dark. Ready your corpse paint and grab a towel, tonight we jam with Metalocalpyse: Army of the Doomstar.
I’ll be real with you, I can honestly say that I have missed some stuff. By that, I mean a movie (excluding this one), and probably at least one season of the show. You know what though? How bad can it be? Well, to answer that before we get into the plot - although it didn’t come of as super necessary, it left a lot of voids where things getting referenced probably would have made a bit more sense then when you drop in and suddenly folks are getting mind controlled and stuff. In relative fairness however, the movie wasn’t hard for me to follow regardless of all the voids, the most complex negative would just be missing out on some characters that I probably should have known but had no clue who they were. The movie picks up (I assume) right after the last one, with the band getting ready to move on with things, except the singer has some pretty heavy PTSD from those aforementioned events that I had missed out on. Turns out there is a lot of pressure to save the world from an evil star of doom with the power of music you haven’t even written yet. Think of it like Bill and Ted if the repercussions for not writing the greatest song and bringing the world together was just utter hellish annihilation . The evil forces led by a mysterious old kung-fu wizard looking guy who controls peoples minds and bodies (one at a time) are bent on making sure the band doesn’t succeed. Whoever wins, knowing how the band’s concerts usually go, death and carnage is bound to ensue.
While the show was rather crass and silly, slathered in an animated coating that has a fondness for metal both chugging and brutal, it’s easy to understand why a young metal head would love it. Much like something like the show Archer, it uses it’s extremes for entertainment value in a way that it ends up being less shocking in the long run and more just an expected background noise poking the comedy. I’ll easily admit it’s not for everyone - I mean, first off if you hate metal then you’d already be fighting an uphill battle to enjoy the show. You can fully expect profane language and references such as “dildos” uses in a variety of ways - which I bet most people didn’t know was a word almost as versatile as the ever-popular “dude.” This time around though, it wears it’s more serious tones at a much more surface level - be it a quip about a role in the band or finding meaning in things. Yes, it’s a bit power of friendship - just again, slathered in metal and the over-the-top GWAR style splatter most people would probably have jump to mind when you mention heavy metal.
With the drag on a more serious top level, the characters do benefit from it. Well, at least three of them do. The drummer, singer, and bassist to be specific. They all have some form of an arc or emphasized role to play in the movie and how things play out, be it looking out for the others or going on a journey to discover that family was always there to begin with. It by no means stops the movie from being run ramshackle with side characters that people can recognize in little one-off bits or other multi-scene runs as side characters though. Some of them I’m not familiar with do to the lack of me having seen all the stuff between when I last saw the show ages ago and watching this movie. Still, most characters that get emphasized the most feel like it’s tied to the plot and not just completely wasted screen time. Most.
Forces of evil.
The actors (which are surprisingly less than you would think given the size of the cast) are all voice related roles here given it’s animated. In turn, you do miss out on some of the classics like body language - but the animations do a good job of adding that back in on a character-personality based method. If someone is feeling down and dumpy, you can see it in how the character is standing, and then the voice lines will come in and support it. The lines all get delivered well, and you won’t really need subtitles to understand it (although having them on didn’t hurt me any either). It’s a good fit of both staying in character but also playing with some of them in new ways. The inter-play between them is pretty on point for what I remember of the show as well, which is a bit more impressive when sometimes it’s just one person going back and forth with themselves.
Animation quality is great here. It all has that exaggerated metal music video vibe (much like I recall from the show), and it gets pretty varied. Yes, there’s a lot of dark clothes and moody backdrops, but there’s also absolutely wild (and probably offensive to some folks) trippy sequences full of color and kaleidoscope style shifts. The brutality of the show comes back as I remember it as well, full of melting faces, exploding bodies, and other ways of painting scenes red. It’s over the top yes, and like I mentioned real early on it won’t be for everyone - but then again, if the target is the classic metalhead, then you aren’t going after everyone to begin with. Still, the vibes slam right into your expectations, and it all looks and moves great while doing it - regardless of how well that sits with you on the violence level. It’s also not just static cameras all the time, or however you would visualize setting up a camera in an animated flick, and you get plenty of movement and perspective in the different angles and shots. I say this fuill well knowing that I picked probably the most boring two screenshots I could for this movie, but it is what it is.
Now, to me there was really only one thing that was important about the choice of this movie. More than anything else, I expected a good soundtrack - specifically at least one good metal song. See, although the show wasn’t all metal all the time, I do recall some absolute bangers like “Murdertrain a-coming”, “Thunderhorse”, “Mustakrakish”, and even that whimsical little “Underwater Friends” from the Murmaider episode. The movie here lived up to that for me - plenty of moody classical orchestral style parts, but also inserting some home made metal songs in numerous parts. It’s one of the few movies where I can say I do remember some of the music afterwards, and as an extra cheat I’m actually listening to the soundtrack as I’m writing all of this to help me focus (whereas usually I’ll just pull up some of the old synthwave or LoFi to help keep me on task). There are plenty of dramatic swells and flourishes, but the music also knows when to not overstate itself and just stay in the background to be pure mood for whats going on. Meanwhile you have other tracks that almost sound like they came out of a video game with the orchestra slamming in at times to really punch the mood in - such as in the track “Deploy” which at times sounds borderline like something I’d hear on the soundtrack for Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. I chose the movie for it’s soundtrack without having heard it yet, but it did not disappoint me - and it’s not even because it’s all super metals.
The band of the klok.
There’s a lot going on here. I think the easiest sell-out of a way I could wrap it up would be to say “if you liked Metalocalypse, you’ll love this.” Like, it both tells you everything if you already know and nothing if you don’t at the same time. It gets serious with some of its themes, even if the backdrop is chaos and riffs, and I think there’s some folks out there that will really appreciate that. It still handles the music incredibly well, and never really feels like it’s just using metal as the butt of the joke in so much that metal is right there writing in the next nonsense line picking on bass players for not being heard anyways. It’s melt-your-face over the top, but still smoothly done and fitting with a horde of metal album covers. In the end, we are all just gears in the klok doing our parts, and the movie sure did it’s in making me end my day in a better mood.