Heavy Metal Parking Lot

When I read about this flick, it intrigued me as a heavy metal fan, and as a short and indie film fan.

Unfortunately, it isn't exactly the laugh a minute I expected it to be.

It runs for 18 minutes, a lot of which is "montage" shots. The actual interviews are quite amusing if only for the clothing, hair and language.

Possibly the funniest thing is the people saying "Metallica are the best metal band"... funny because Metallica aren't a metal band any more.

Keep an eye out for a Nigel Tufnel lookalike dressed in a zebra body suit, with a distaste for punk and Madonna.

This little bootleg-movie takes you back to another era, when rock dinosaurs walked the earth and there was no difference between the looks of a guy and a girl. "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" is a hilarious short documentary that gives us an impression of what it meant to be a metal fan in the 80's. The movie starts in the early afternoon as the first people arrive at the parking lot of a concert venue where a Judas Priest concert is going to take place later on. They come, they see, they crank up the volume of their car radios and get wasted. The whole thing is extremely entertaining to watch and also makes you a bit sentimental. In the end, you'll have to wipe a few tears from your eyes and come to the conclusion that metal fans just aren't what they used to be in those days.

Hair, Profanity, booze, being young and restless... Above and foremost, it was a time when hard rock n' roll was in its prime. Found a copy of it recently hiding in a deck among other music dvds in a "Public" Store and it made me listen to all 1986 records that I have. Hell Of a year for hard rock!!! "Zebraman" rules and without any doubt sums up the vibe of the era. By the way, my first concert was Saxon, May 1986 in Athens. They played a blinding set. Spitfire, a very underestimated Greek hard rock band(still fighting and giving great shows you know),was supporting. Judas Priest's of 1986 show was immortalized in "Priest Live" live LP and video too. It really got me rocking' in the summer of '87 when it was released...

C'mon folks... This is the Spinal Tap fan-base without the script!!! Heavy Metal Parking Lots are now a thing of the past as cops patrol and the bands are more about being depressed and less about the RAWK! Back in the day, 20 years ago, the parking lot was where everybody was allowed to get messed up before a show. For those of us who lived it, the movie presents some of those people we met all those years ago.

The editing is what makes this work. Sure, the film concentrates on the basest members of the band's audience, but it is really fun to laugh at how we ALL loved the rock and roll spirit in the 80s that had been handed down to us from the 1970s.

A classic timepiece that needs to be treasured forever.

Great movie.

Well, Judas Priest *still* rules, long as they don't retire (though even then they can rule in perpetuity for another decade or so), so that's a given, I suppose.

But what about what this represents? This is like getting a time capsule or an anthropology class; having gone to some metal shows over the year (and, in the interest of full disclosure, Priest played with Ozzfest in 2004 and arguably did better than actual reunited Black Sabbath at the concert, if just by a smidgen, but I digress), this is fairly accurate. Of course for this time and place it's young people getting f****d up before going in to see their favorite band (and Dokken, lol, Dream Warriors man!), but that's what's compelling about it: it's honest, and that's what matters.

There's nothing else to it except that this filmmaker wanted to see what it was like in a parking lot before a metal concert. Of course it can't be helped that they all react like animals to the camera being there - hey, it's time for a concert, let's have fun - but the energy is certainly different than in the days of Woodstock or Altamont, where people didn't pay the camera too much mind unless if someone actually asked the hippies a question. For these "old-school" metal-heads who love Priest and Metallica and Scorpions and Ozzy (though one guy snorts that "he's gotten chubby!") it's all about showing the PRIEST RULES state of being for the cameras.

You won't exactly get a ton of insight into the culture at large - Spheeris' Decline II: the Metal Years is the place for that as it's a feature - but it's a nifty little 16 minutes that is kind of funny for how passionate these guys and ladies are (sometimes it's hard to tell them apart due to the hair!) and there are little moments that stand out like when a girl says she's 13 (is she really, who knows, who would lie about something like that), or when one of the token Hispanic metal-heads chugs down some whiskey. Metal time!

I think when I say this is anthropology it's that the filmmaker isn't showing us anything that's other than seeing a culture in its natural state of being or habitat: metal-heads are to this parking lot what the earliest homo sapiens were to a cave as they prepared their fire and had their women and Quest for Fire days. One might think it's almost cheesy to see by today's standards of audiences (i.e. Slayer or on the opposite end those EDM shows where people completely zonk out on ecstasy), but there's now a charm to it seeing this 30 years later, back when it was thought that metal was brainwashing young people's minds or even doing things like bringing them to violence.

Are these metal-heads animated? Oh sure. May they be missing some brain cells? Possibly, or they will be more-so by the time they've gone and done their two hours of head-banging and whiskey swigging (or, if you're a groupie, screw Glen Tipton apparently). But they're ultimately, in the vision of this director, harmless. What a... nice trip down memory lane this will be for people of this time and age.