Day 1 - Rock & Rule (1983)

The early 1980s were a great time for animated curiosities. With Disney focusing primarily on their live-action output, plenty of other studios stepped in to seek a piece of the cartoon action. This was the era of The Dark Crystal, of The Flight of Dragons, of The Last Unicorn - for people of my generation, the mere mention of these titles is enough to provoke a nostalgia trip.

In the midst of all this family-friendly fayre, however, there sprang up a healthy crop of animated movies catering to the teenage male demographic. These included Fire and Ice (by Ralph Bakshi, who'd been doing this sort of thing for years) and Heavy Metal, produced by one Ivan Reitman who was soon to go on to much greater things. With their bloodless violence, scantily-clad female characters and hopelessly unsubtle soundtracks, they provided everything a teenage boy needed to mature into a healthy, well-adjusted adult male.

From Canadian studio Nelvana, meanwhile, there came Rock and Rule. A little tamer than the above offerings, it still certainly wasn't one for the kids. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where anthropomorphic animals had risen to take the place of humans, it told the simple story of a boy (Omar), a girl (Angel), and Mok, an insane rock star trying to re-gain his former glory by means of recreational demonology. Not entirely unlike Sunset Boulevard, now I come to think of it, albeit not quite so heavy on the histrionics.

I'd been hoping to kick off the 31 Days Challenge with a real stinker - namely, The Apple. Circumstances conspired against me, however, leaving me without a watchable copy but still craving a good old-fashioned crappy rock musical with which to start my cinematic odyssey. The virtually identical plotline meant that Rock and Rule was the first thing that sprang to mind.

The good

The first thing I should say is that at no point during this movie was I ever actually bored. It wasn't great cinema - heck, it wasn't even good cinema - but it was pretty clear to me that whoever made it had a vision, and actually cared what they were doing. 

I wasn't too keen on the character animation - remember all those 80s and 90s Disney Saturday morning cartoons with the generic animal people? Omar and a few of the minor characters were identifiably rats, but without the expository screencrawl I'd have had no idea we were in a world where animals had taken over. The city backgrounds were beautiful though, and the early driving scenes had a real Blade Runner vibe that drew me in from the outset.

Into this came Omar, our hero, an angry young rat refusing to allow his female bandmate her share of the limelight. I think it took a certain degree of courage to try and make the audience identify with such an overtly unlikeable character, although arguably not so much courage as it took to have the female lead carry the majority of the story. I have plenty of complaints about gender issues within this movie, but Angel was a great, proactive heroine who got the job done while her male bandmates were deceived or caved to temptation at more or less every turn.

For a film that uses its music as a selling point, I found most of the songs fairly unmemorable; worryingly, the plot hinges on one song that can bring about the apocalypse and one that can prevent it, and less than 48 hours after viewing the movie I'm hard-pressed to remember either. Credit, however, has to be given to the late and much-lamented Lou Reed, who provided Mok's singing voice - his central number is languid and lyrical at once, simultaneously a joy and a benighted earworm I'm going to be stuck with for days now.

Honourable goes to a couple of visual tricks that would've left the six-year-old me with nightmares for weeks; the glorious, roaring madness of the demonic summoning (vocals provided by Iggy Pop) and a butterfly with talking wings that was genuinely creepy to the extent that I'd have to nerve myself before watching again.

Finally, credit has to be given for a 77-minute running time. Whatever else you can say about bad movies of the 80s, they at least have the good manners to waste less of your life than their modern counterparts.

The bad

Do I really have to discuss the sexual politics of the early 1980s here? While Angel escapes relatively lightly on the objectification front, most of the other female characters aren't so lucky. The vast majority of these feature in a much-vaunted nightclub scene that's memorable for all the wrong reasons, featuring male band members hunting for a lady with one particular tattoo. This is the kind of thing that even Benny Hill might have thought was in questionable taste.

Rock and Rule isn't the sort of film that stands up well to analysis, either; the entire film exists in a swirling vortex around the gigantic plot hole whereby Mok's motivations are never even remotely explained. If he's a rock star who craves fame and adulation, why would he be summoning a being whose sole implied purpose is death and destruction? This is a question I've been giving altogether too much thought over the past couple of days, and I'm still utterly stumped.

The verdict

This was a fun little curio, and a few visually inventive touches plus Lou Reed's vocals probably even make it something I'd return to on a sufficiently bored afternoon.

I'm still glad they made this a decade too early for it to have been made for me, though - it meant I got to have the likes of Wayne's World aimed at me instead.

NB: This film is available in its entirety on YouTube, so if you're interested, feel free to check it out.