The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 15-21
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)
Directed by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn
You roll up, peering from the backseat, while the rest roll their spliffs. Who cares if it’s still light? Judas Priest’s on soon, man, and the Busch won’t chug itself. Religious rite? Please; heavy metal fanaticism’s its own register, sharper than Rob Halford’s steel. Yet his black leather attack, flanked by posturing axe-masters, appears only at the close of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, an unpolished glimpse of unpolished youth at its loudest and doofiest. It’s only sixteen minutes long, but its subjects—sans teeth, sans shirts, sans coherence—stick like Linklater’s slackers. Don’t fear them, and certainly don’t condescend; if anything, bring your best envy, plus the same anthropological curiosity held by fresh-faced Krulik and Heyn. The grainy, oft-bootlegged shake flatters few, whether frizzy-haired or zebra-striped, visually matching metal’s rough decadence. When we revisit these heads in the Where Are They Now? segment, they look back with relish and justified embarrassment at a time when the pre-show hang meant something more than social media ruin or Dave Matthews. Is it still a music documentary? Absolutely; a slurred croon of “Living After Midnight” or a tribal chant of “Priest! Priest! Priest!” is as true as the real thing. Max Kyburz (June 17, 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s Krulik series, in a program featuring Heavy Metal Parking Lot: Where Are They Now?, Heavy Metal Parking Lot Goes to China, and “other surprises”)