A fake Finnish metal band went from film school to cult film

Heavy Trip was released in Finland on 9 March 2018. It is the first feature by directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, Finnish filmmakers who had made music videos for local bands, and it grew out of a film school short about an invented death metal band. It is a comedy about metal fans that treats them with affection, which is much of why it found an audience far from home.

The band is called Impaled Rektum. Its singer, Turo, lives in a small town in northern Finland, and the group has struggled to get out of the basement and its cover songs. After a reindeer carcass jams a meat grinder, they write their first original song. A promoter for a big festival in Norway hears of them, and they set off to get there, which means stealing a recreational vehicle and digging up a dead bandmate's coffin along the way.

How did a school short become a feature?

Laatio and Vidgren first made a mockumentary, a fake documentary, about Impaled Rektum while at film school. Before the feature, they had spent about 12 years making music videos for Finnish bands, according to their interview at South by Southwest, the Texas festival where the film later premiered.

The feature idea took hold in November 2011, after they dropped a large post-apocalyptic science fiction project and chose to go smaller. The film was finished about five years later. The directors have named This Is Spinal Tap, the classic fake rock documentary, along with The Blues Brothers and The Simpsons as influences.

The budget was about 3 million euros, a figure finland.fi called exceptionally high for a Finnish film of this kind. The score came mostly from Lauri Porra, a member of the Finnish metal band Stratovarius.

Why does it take place in Finland?

Finland is the setting that makes the joke work. The film takes place in rural northern Finland, where metal is a defining identity, and finland.fi says it treats the scene with affection rather than mockery. Producers have said Finland has more metal bands per capita than any other nation, though that is their claim, not a measured ranking.

The comedy comes from the gap between the music and the people who play it. Vidgren said in an interview that a lot of the metalheads he knows are lovely people, and the film leans on that contrast. finland.fi describes the villain as a smug pop singer tied to iskelmä, a treacly Finnish easy-listening style, so metal plays the underdog.

What happened when it came out?

In Finland, the reception was cool at first. Vidgren described it as lukewarm, and said the film caught on later through TV and streaming, with metal fans leading the way. Abroad, it did better. Wikipedia's Fantasy Filmfest page lists it as the 2018 winner of the festival's Fresh Blood Award, the German audience prize for a director's first or second feature.

Vidgren said in 2019 that it had been sold to distributors in roughly 20 to 30-something countries, and that he had expected it to feel too Finnish for international viewers. In Japan, fans dress as its characters at special screenings. A sequel from the same directors, Heavier Trip, opened in US theatres and on VOD on 29 November 2024.

Who is it for?

It suits anyone who likes underdog stories, road trips and affectionate comedy about a subculture, and it needs no knowledge of metal. It is mainly in Finnish, and it runs 91 minutes.

Comedy