A Film a Week - Heavy Trip / Hevi reissu

Some relevant scientific researches have found a co-relation between the strength of some country’s heavy metal scene, its general development and the overall happiness of its people. We can hardly imagine heavy metal as the music of happy people (or the upper classes for that matter), but apparently, if it is possible and socially acceptable for its young adults from blue collar background to channel the negative emotions like fear, angst and the appetite for (self-)destruction through some aggressive guitar-shredding, it means that some country is a happy member of the first world. If we take the Anglo-Saxon countries, Germany and Scandinavia as an example, we can see that the theory stands.

Also, it is worth noting that, contrary to the popular tropes and residuals of moral panic from the past century, metalheads are not necessarily dumb, aggressive kids and/or fanatical animal-sacrificing blood-thirsty Devil-worshippers, but simply people who prefer some kind of music over the others and spot a certain look. Movie-wise, however, the tropes still works, especially in comedies for the fun effect. And when treated in a smart way, which is the case with Jusso Laatio and Jukka Vindgren’s feature debut Heavy Trip, they can generate a lot of laughs without feeling condescending.

It is the story of a (fictional) extreme metal band called Impaled Rectum from a village in the north of Finland and its struggle to success imagined as a performance on a famous Norwegian festival. Before that, they kept rehearsing by playing covers in the basement of the fast guitarist Lotvonen’s (Samuli Jaskio) family business – the reindeer slaughterhouse. The band consists also of the daredevil drummer Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen), the walking metal encyclopedia bassist Pasi (Max Ovaska) who works as a librarian in his daily life and the gentle singer Turo (Johannes Holopainen of Unknown Soldier fame) who has to take the verbal abuse from almost everyone in the village, like the police chief and the local punks, while having a literally shitty job as an orderly in a mental institution. Needless to say, when holding a microphone, he turns into a growling beast. He is the protagonist and our perspective in the story and is also involved in a love triangle sub-plot with his ex-classmate, the beautiful florist Miia (Minka Kuustonen) and his nemesis, a local pop-singer buffoon Jouni Tulkku (Ville Tiihonen).

The description promises a road movie in the likes of The Blues Brothers, only more metal in sound and attitude, but Laatio and Vindgren, together with their co-writers Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olvi Rantala, take some sweet time to get the band on the road trip, while scoring laughs on the home field, putting the characters in some potentially dangerous situations with the rest of the townsfolk. Those set pieces are based on stereotypes and might prove to be even a bit offensive to both sides in the “conflict” (stupid metalheads doing dangerous stuff, sleazy rednecks that change their attitudes towards them when they have a shot to become famous), but here are done with a special warmth in hearts and minds of the writers, even though they are basically milking for laughs at predictable places.

Heavy Trip has some other classics of rock cinema in its DNA, like the early 90’s comedies Airheads and Wayne’s World, but the difference is Laatio and Vindgred are very aware of those films and that they are just playing with them (there is no way that every time the band plays, the look of the film changes towards some music video aesthetics), so they are not trying too hard to look cool while using the familiar tropes to make us laugh while making their characters silly in a likeable way. Not every joke is spot on, but most of them are and we can relate to the characters even though most of them are just rough sketches. The visual identity of the film is also smart, using the natural surroundings to highlight Turo’s loneliness and offering a glimpse into the boring life in Finnish countryside.

Once the road trip starts more than halfway into the film, more outlandish, over the top stuff is about to turn up, and Heavy Trip becomes one really enjoyable fare, no matter if the audience is full of metalheads or not. It is pure fun, nothing more, nothing less.

A Film a Week - Euthanizer / Armomurhaaja

Apparently, rural Finland is a place where a person can meet a variety of colourful characters, like a car mechanic who bears the title “of thousand vaginas”, a bunch of comically useless neo-Nazi poseurs who call themselves “The Soldiers of Finland”, but instead of fighting the non-existent immigrants, they are more interested in designing logos and stealing car tyres, a hospice nurse with the taste for erotic asphyxiation or a motorbike repair-man who moonlights as a euthanizer for the folks poor enough to go to greedy veterinarians at the clinic. The latter is the titular character of an offbeat drama-thriller directed by Teemu Nikki, self-taught filmmaker with a number of shorts, music videos, commercials, a hit series and two feature-length films behind him. It is already quite a success that there were some brave or crazy people in Finnish film institutions to make Euthanizer an Oscar candidate. Chances are slim, but, hey, who would think that Lordi could win the Eurosong contest?

Euthanizer’s “Christian name” is Veijo Haukka and he is a bit of a jerk, a 60-ish pipe-smoking loner who will give his customers a lecture about how they are the cruel ones for actually keeping animals as pets without knowing enough about their natural needs. He is played to perfection by the legendary Finnish character actor Matti Onnismaa. Veijo’s ethics might seem unorthodox, yet firm: smaller animals like cats would get a gas chamber made out of an old car, dog will get shot, even the roadkill will get a proper burial and not a single healthy animal would die of his hand.

He is less merciful with people not just because of his seemingly heartless lectures, but his general attitude towards people. He will not hesitate to give hard time to the veterinarian he finds greedy and unethical, and even to his dying father (Heikki Nousiainen), a former alcoholic now in hospice. Like some kind of a folksy philosopher, Veijo sees that everybody, his father included, should receive just the right amount of pain before they die. It might seem that he is given a chance of happiness when he meets his father’s nurse Lotta (Hannamaija Nikander) who takes an instant interest in him, but his principal character flaw and a misunderstanding of sorts will get him in trouble with an emasculated member of a nazi gang named Petri (Jari Virman) and his thug buddies…

A piece of trivial information says that Nikki has finished the principal photography of the film before even looking for funding, but it can be explained with the fact that most of his cast and crew were his collaborators on previous project, including the actors and co-producer Jani Pösö who also served as the co-writer on his two previous features Simo Times Three (2012) and Lovemilla (2015). Nikki was his own editor and together with the cinematographer Sari Aaltonen keen on handheld camerawork, he also served as the set and costume designer. The whole budget was around 300.000 € and the film has a certain B-movie appeal to it.

Speaking of that, it is worth noting that the whole B-movie thing is not a piece of hipster irony (even though there is more than enough irony, sarcasm and pitch-black humour delivered with a deadpan seriousness in the film’s text, which is kinda typical for the Finnish way of life), but an earnest effort in the likes of Monte Hellman’s films where animals, cars and vistas also have a certain role in social landscape and the “smart-ass-ery” of the protagonist can be read as a tribute to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry which Nikki quotes as a big influence.

On the other hand, Euthanizer does not just play cool like B-movies usually do, it is cool because, of all things, its emotional core and strong sense of humaneness portrayed through the unapologetic character of Veijo (who is the only one fully developed). It might take time for him to get under our skin, but once he is there, we could follow him to the end of the world. His larger than life personality (due to Onnismaa masterful acting), together with the title, is the reason for the film to work also as an out of the box origins story to a superhero series, which, having Rendel in mind, might be a trend in Finnish genre cinema. We might just need a slightly different ending, maybe one more scene, one more shot, mid-credits or a regular one.