p e n g u i n d e v i l

Oh, take me back… So we watched the infamous Heavy Metal Parking Lot. A great little film (about 15 minutes long) that a couple of guys made interviewing people in the parking lot of a Judas Priest and Dokken concert in 1986. Though this was the period where I began to move away from metal (thanks primarily to the horror I felt upon hearing “turbo lover” and seeing Priest’s “fruit striped leather” look), watching this really rings true with me and brought me back to those folks I hung out with back in the early 1980’s (“it’s ’cause he’s evil, man, evil” Dave Murphy on King Diamond circa 1984) and, of course, seeing Judas Priest at the Memorial Coliseum in 1982. Though I didn’t spend any time in the parking lot. A good thing too, as the parking lot here is filled with lots of drinking, cursing, feathered hair, cool t-shirts (though I wondered about the Rolling Stones), shirtless guys and all of that good stuff.

The folks who populate Heavy Metal Parking Lot are all pretty drunk and excited, and nice and friendly (though “zebraman” (shown above) does have some harsh words for punk rock and Madonna). The trouble with this film is that most youngen’s now think of it as a comedy, when for some of us it is more a slice of our youth being offered up for display. Though I guess that all teen scenes seems pretty funny in retrospect… And the movie can be pretty funny.

There are a lot of special features, most of which aren’t that great… Neil Diamond Parking Lot is somewhat entertaining, but Harry Potter Parking Lot is pretty dull. One of the features that is somewhat interesting is the HMPL reunions. They find and interview 4 folks who were in the movie, none of whom had seen it (or even known about it) until recently, if at all. So it’s somewhat fun to see these folks 20ish years later. But they were more fun in the feature.

The best part though is one of the special features, Heavy Metal Basement. Some 40-something guy (Jim Powell of Metal Grind Records?) walks us down into his basement, which is an slice of 1980’s metal heaven… Thousand of LP’s, posters, bits of memorabilia, a wall covered with interesting beers cars, a kiss pinball machine… And more. But the high point is that he has a stack of records on the floor, and he goes through them one by one. There are about 65 records in all and they are all Judas Priest records. They actually let him spend 28 minutes guiding us through the history of Priest, record by record. I thought it was pretty neat, lots of bootlegs and all… But I wanted him to move on to the rest of his records. One of these days, I’ll put all my crap in a room like this too…