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Heavy Metal Parking
Lot
Transplated from Maryland's
Capitol Center to the 18th Annual Olympia Film Festival
review by KJ Doughton, 9 November
2001 To many people
who saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the cult documentary’s
landscape was more alien and frightening than that of the Red
Planet. To others, especially those who grew up in the eighties and
swore their allegiance to hard rock music, the imagery was nostalgic
and tear inducing. The year was 1986, and the Largo, Maryland
Capitol Center had attracted thousands of headbanging teenagers to
worship featured acts Judas Priest and Dokken.
Like a Sunday morning church
congregation, the faithful geared up early for the concert,
swaggering impatiently next to their muscle cars after navigating
around orange traffic cones to the venue’s massive parking lot.
Drunken stoners with frosted hair, headbands, and tank tops faced
off against horse-bound patrol cops with tan uniforms and redneck
moustaches. The tinny sound of such Judas Priest anthems as “You’ve
Got Another Thing Coming” and “Breaking the Law” strained from car
stereos, while ticket-buyers stood in line and gave the “devil’s
hand sign” to passers-by.
Meanwhile, all of these memorable
sights and sounds were being immortalized by filmmaker Jeff Krulik,
a bespectacled, balding fortysomething who fought his way through
the rabid masses like a war photographer storming the beaches of
Normandy at D-Day. When Krulik asked a concert-bound girl where she
was from, the mascara-dipped wench replied, “I came here from the
West Coast. I’m on acid now.”
Recently resurrected during a
fifteenth-anniversary showing at The Eighteenth Annual Olympia Film
Festival last month, Heavy Metal Parking Lot is a true
underground classic. Filmed by Krulik on a shoestring budget with
fellow lensman John Heyn, it’s a flavorful slice of anthropological
pie that perfectly sums up the vibe of the mid-eighties music scene.
At a time before the emergence of Nirvana, when more flamboyant
bands like Judas Priest and their fraternal partners in metal like
Ratt, Motley Crue, Dio, and Scorpions reigned supreme, such concert
scenes were a bridge between the disco era and the grunge
renaissance. Arena rock ruled, and it was still hip to dress up and
sing about dungeons and dragons.
With this in mind, there was no
better band to host the party than Judas Priest. Blonde guitarist
KK Downing stood opposite brunette counterpart Glenn Tipton, while
both of them pelted riffs at listeners from stage left and
stage right. Bass and drums vibrated coliseums. The band’s
charismatic blonde singer, Rob Halford, wailed in ear-piercing
falsetto and drove onstage perched atop a motorcycle. A kind of
heavy-metal Liberace, he donned leather and studs and alternated
between party anthems (sample lyric: “Livin’ after midnight, rockin’
to the dawn, lovin’ ‘til the morning – then I’m gone!”) and more
apocalyptic numbers about war and death. It was the ultimate irony
when this embodiment of redneck, macho energy came out of the closet
in 1992 to announce that he way gay.
Theatrical to the extreme, Judas
Priest’s onstage antics were still upstaged by the goofy rock god
worship demonstrated by their pre-show fans, which Krulik and Heyn
stalked using ¾ inch video and tube cameras. It’s not until the end
of Heavy Metal Parking Lot that we actually see footage of
the band: the main focus of this grainy, slapdash, fifteen-minute
movie is Judas Priest’s maniacal following waiting in line out
front. When Krulik asks a black-garbed redhead with bad skin what
she would do upon meeting Halford, she screams, “I’d jump his
bones!” Little did she know.
Later, the camera-wielder comes
across a vanload of kids sporting an open drink cooler. “Have a
Busch or a Budweiser,” offers a friendly local yokel wearing a
military green shirt that says, Kill ‘em All – Let God Sort ‘em
Out. Nearby, another mob of hyped-up teens hold a Judas Priest
banner made of bedsheets, while chanting, “Priest! Priest! Priest!”
Hanging out by the band’s tour bus is a runty male with a black and
white striped shirt. “Heavy metal rules,” claims the outspoken
critic, affectionately dubbed “Zebra Boy” by Krulik. “All that punk
sh*t sucks and Madonna can go to hell!” All the while, he’s
attempting to chug beer from an unopened bottle. Who says that
today’s youth aren’t respectable?
Krulik finds tenderness and good
intentions lurking amidst the hedonistic partying. After a fan was
killed in a recent auto accident, his mother wrote to the band’s
management and scored concert tickets for the victim’s friends, who
stand outside with a banner dedicated to their deceased pal. “Timmy
Loves Judas Priest,” reads the cloth sign. Finally, Heavy Metal
Parking lot concludes with some footage of the band cranking out
“Headin’ Out to the Highway.” After the music fades, it’s back to
blue collar jobs and trailer courts for the movie’s well-satiated
rockers.
However, it’s here that the true
legend of Heavy Metal Parking Lot begins. Since Krulik and
Heyn edited the film and dubbed off copies to friends while living
in Washington D.C. and working in public television, their creation
has become the Frankenstein’s Monster of cult short films. “In
1994,” he explains, “John got a call from Sophia Coppola, who had
rented a copy in L.A. at a video store. The tapes were actually
being sold and circulated – unofficially – by such music and video
outlets across the country. By that time, we had pretty much shelved
the film, thinking of it as just an amusing little novelty. Then
other celebrities, like Belinda Carlyle and Nirvana, started
inquiring about it as well. We realized that the movie had really
struck a nerve with people.” Allegedly, there are more bootlegged
copies of Heavy Metal Parking Lot floating around than the
infamous Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tapes.
More recently, the Def America band
American Hi-Fi lifted imagery from Krulik’s film and incorporated it
into their video, “Flavor of the Week.” The mannerisms and fashion
choices of key characters are pilfered in this tale of a slutty
rocker chick being jilted by her big-hair boyfriend, amidst souped-up
Chevys and drunken rockers roaming across an asphalt jungle
identical to that featured in Heavy Metal Parking Lot. ‘They
never approached us or asked permission,” says Krulik.
Meanwhile, the director revisited
the Capital Center parking lot ten years after their first bout of
trailing unsuspecting music fans. This time, however, the vibe was
significantly different – Neil Diamond was in town. Instead of
Camaros, the lot was jammed with SUV’s. A tuxedo-clad man in a
wheelchair is spotted sipping Diet Coke from a red cooler. A gaggle
of women congregate next to the auditorium with roses destined for
Mr. Diamond’s stage. When asked why their husbands and boyfriends
aren’t with them, the fiftysomething group responds in unison,
“Because we don’t have any!” Still, the lusty air of sexual
energy remains much like it did when metalheads congregated here a
decade ago. When a middle-aged blonde talks of wanting to get
friendly with her crooning idol, an onlooker cackles, “Go for it,
girl!” Way past adolescence, the hormones are still active in
Maryland.
Other amateur filmmakers have
gotten into the act and filmed similar parking lot homages. Raver
Bathroom. Harry Potter Sidewalk. Girl Power Parking Lot. The
list goes on.
Although the director maintains a
professional, informative web site dedicated to his cult classics (www.planetkrulik.com),
complete with information of how to buy merchandise and other
mail-order items, he confesses that Heavy Metal Parking Lot
has never been very profitable. To remedy this, Krulik is currently
negotiating the production of a feature film. “We’ve got a concept
that will include a reunion of the original people featured in the
film,” he explains. “We have positive ID’s on twelve of them, from
people who sent their yearbooks, or went to school with them. The
idea for the movie is a weird combination of Schindler’s List
meets Rock ‘n Roll High School. Or in the spirit of Wayne’s
World. Anything is possible.”
Sounds metal. Beaming off of
Planet Krulik with a flash of the devil’s hand sign and a raised
cigarette lighter flickering to the heavens.
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