Heavy Trip
Reindeer in blood
meets The Blues Brothers, in Finland.
In this sweet-natured slapstick road movie from first-time directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, a small-town Finnish metal band struggle to make their dreams come true. Which is uneven as comedy, but has the rare advantage of getting the hard-rocking music right.
Turo (Johannes Holopainen) is the shy, affable frontman of the Impaled Rektum, who boldly bill themselves as “symphonic postapocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan metal”, but have never ventured outside their basement, until a slender chance to play Norway’s Northern Inferno festival sends them off on a wild “mission from Satan”.
Heavy Trip has been likened to Spinal Tap, but it is much closer to The Blues Brothers in its sunny cartoonish tone. A thunderous score by Mika Lammassaari (of melodic thrashers Mors Subita) is the crucial ingredient here, lending authentic blast beats and turbo-grinding riffs to an otherwise old-fashioned, formulaic tale of amiable dorks shooting for the stars. ■■■■■■■■■■