Heavy Trip (2018)
Here at Plopcorn towers we scour the world looking for the best worst films to watch just so you don’t have to. Sometimes it can be a lot of fun and other times it can be a painful experience. Therefore, when we decided to watch a Finnish film with subtitles about a death metal band we were not looking forward to it. How wrong we were…
Heavy trip tells the story of Turo and his band who are the outcast, long-haired heavy metal lovers in a small Finnish village. When an incident with a meat grinder provides inspiration for their own song the band find themselves passing a demo tape to a Norwegian heavy metal festival promotor.
Naturally, the exuberance that follows leads to Turo bragging to the local flower shop girl, Miia, that they are going to play the festival. From there things spirals out of control for poor Turo as the whole village and the rest of the band think that they are going to become international rock stars. Eventually the band seize the guitar by the neck and set out to make their dream happening in what is one of the funniest movies we’ve watched in an age.
While the film is in Finnish, the delivery is so strong and entertaining that you forget you are reading subtitles and find yourself getting dragged into the world of a struggling Finnish death metal band in a way that is both compelling and entertaining.
For those of you that enjoy alternative music you will recognise the angst Turo is exposed to as a metal head outcast. The way the local louts call him “Homo” whenever he rides past on his World War 2 looking bicycle or the way the local police chief thinks he is a drug taking hippy. will have a resonance with you that pulls you in deeper into the film.
These encounters are not there to remind you however about such things but will have you laughing aloud before you even get to the mentally deranged inmate, an attempt to create a band promo image using the local speed camera or the Jesus and his disciples stag party.
This film has so much going for it. There is very much an undertone of Spinal Tap with a bit of Blues Brothers thrown in for good measure, but where the film strikes a power chord is the characters are well defined and easily like-able. Perhaps not everyone has been the uncool kid in town but we all like an underdog to succeed and that at the end of the film is what happens.
The delivery of the gags and lines are brilliant and loses nothing in translation; with the characters riffing off each other in a natural way with banter that would be at home in an A list comedy. There are plenty of laughs throughout the whole film, even though it is a bit silly, but none of this detracts from what’s an enjoyable way to spend a few hours watching a film.
Overall, get out there and get watching and talking about this film. It’s worth every penny you spend on it and hopefully it can get the recognition it deserves. We don’t know if it’s the perfect Plopcorn film, but it’s damn close and by god we now love symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan fennoscandian metal.
