Heavy Trip (Hevi Reissu)

 If you've ever wondered what a crowd-pleasing indie extreme metal movie would look like, well, wonder no more: It would look like any other crowd-pleasing indie comedy, but with better music.

 Heavy Trip is a goofy, likeable trifle from that least extreme (metal) of Scandinavian countries, Finland*. It eschews church burnings or crypto-nazi beliefs and focuses instead in the more common sort of metalhead, the one you might actually meet - a bunch of quiet outsider types.

 

 First seen together playing a Gothenburg-style version of an old Finnish standard, the boys in (what will be known as) IMPALED REKTUM have been rehearsing together in the basement of a reindeer butcher house (metal!) for twelve years without ever showing their music to anyone else; put it down to lead singer Turo's (Johannes Holopainen) crippling shyness - the dude looks like a Viking raider, but can't raise the courage to stand up to anyone or for anything.

 Filling out the band are the down-to-earth guitarist Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio), affable, enthusiastic drummer Jinkky (Antti Tuomas Heikkinen, in the film's more overt Spinal Tap homage) and Pasi (Max Ovaska), a more traditional metal nerd with eidetic memory.

 Through a series of contrivances the band becomes the talk of their backwater town when they seemingly score a gig in a Norwegian metal festival. They go from being the butt of cartoonish bullying - this is the sort of movie that stacks the deck by making almost everyone in town behave like an absolute asshole towards our protagonists - to local heroes, before the other shoe inevitably drops.
 The third act of the movie turns into a road trip as the band, after a few complications that resulted in an added abducted mental patient (Chike Ohanwe), tries to make their way to the festival.

 The film is at its most likeable when it's at its quietest; it begins with Turo getting bullied, for example, berating himself for not being able to come up with even a basic comeback. Poor Lotvonen gets a little shafted in the characterization department, but there's a genuine sweetness to how the movie portrays these knuckleheads and their various hang-ups: Jinkky's beef with a speed camera, for one of the film's funniest conceits, or Pasi coming out in his corpse-paint persona, or Turo's crush on a local florist - it's all handled sensitively, and the actors do a great job with the material.

 As the plot ramps up on the last third there's a little less space for this sort of character work and the movie suffers, but it remains unassuming and pleasant even as the action around the band gets suitably epic. This is where the film indulges its Hollywoodian crowd-pleasing instincts a little too much - expect neat resolutions and easy outs;  The humor gets pretty absurd, too ("Listen! I love Satan as much as any woman in their forties...") and the events get a bit self-consciously METAL - but this is where all the work the movie did to establish the characters pays off. It feels earned.

 Pacing is a bigger problem, as is a very hit-and-miss, kitchen-sink sense of humor that gets a little too goofy and slapstick-y for its own good at times; but it does get quite a few great jokes in, so I guess that's ok. 

 Best of all is that the movie celebrates all forms of metal (there's a character named after Dokken, for some reason; They had a song in Boys from County Hell - coincidence?) but focuses on black metal. The guitars and voice for the original songs are provided by members of Mors Subita, and there are jokes about illegible band logos, black metal recording practices (Pasi reverentially describes how one song was recorded with a microphone stuck into a sheep carcass) and extremely niche genre classifications (the band is repeatedly described as "Symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal" with a straight face).

 There's genuine affection for the music and the scene, without a mention of the genre's more, ahem, problematic, elements. It's a relentlessly positive movie (despite featuring grave-robbing, projectile vomiting, and lounge singing) that probably won't blow anyone's mind, but it's an extremely pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.
 And maybe that's not the adjective you'd want out of a black metal comedy but hey, it's still pretty good. A sequel has already been written by the same writing/directing team (Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren; Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olavi Rantala co-wrote); Bring it on, I'm looking forward to spending more time with these folks.

* I'm joking, Impaled Nazarene fans! I'm joking!