Music video channels make money by convincing their audience that all music is a feast for the taking, and that it requires little to enter into its world. It is not surprising that VH1's coverage of heavy metal is limited to the more public side of it, focusing on the famous bands in the mainstream. They eat by selling us big label products.

What is excellent about this documentary is its bonehead simplicity in tracing the history of metal. It focuses on nodal points where single events touched off nascent convergences and caused paradigm shifts. Although this is a simple technique, it is applied here in strength in a way alarmingly similar to the ANUS.com history of metal -- tying together historical events, especially the Reagan Years, with the changes that wrought metal sub-genres.

There are some oddities that make people laugh out loud. Although Rolling Stone editor David Fricke carefully uses the term "speed metal" to refer to Metallica et al, the documentary hammers home the term "thrash metal," proving yet again that the preferences of those who make their money selling you products you do not need are preferences you can consider harmful. Of thrash, the actual genre (DRI, Cryptic Slaughter, dead horse) no mention is made at all.

Another oddity is calling Guns and Roses an "underground" band. Indeed, the fawning gets excessive with GnR, who are called dangerous, unpredictable, revolutionary, and so on, ignoring what made them so popular: they were Van Halen and Def Leppard combined with the surliness of American blues rock. Like many other parts of this documentary, this encomium falls flat because when fans talk about heavy metal, they don't mean hard rock, especially now after death metal and black metal have educated many.

One major strength of this documentary, coming from a production studio with the contacts and clout to make it happen, is the sheer star power of the people interviewed here. Most major figures in radio heavy metal are featured in this documentary at one point or another, as are many journalists, including some with knowledge of underground metal.

For those hoping for mention of underground metal, there is disappointment: this is a documentary about products you buy in a mall that are endorsed safe by capitalism and a libertarian/liberal "freedom of speech" but are more corrupt than those ideas found in underground metal. Death metal is not mentioned, nor is black metal. It skips from Metallica to Marilyn Manson.

Not only is death metal not mentioned, but little coverage is given to bands whose goal was not to get on the radio, get out a video, and make profit. The centerpiece of this documentary are the glam years of Hollywood bands from Van Halen to Guns and Roses, and much of it is intended to make them look more sophisticated and intense than their European counterparts who invented the genre. Still, this is to be expected; this documentary is as much infomercial as serious filmmaking.

In its coverage of glam rock, power ballads, bad boy rebels and drug abuse this film is most lucid. Humorously, the glam rockers, twenty years later, look somewhat diseased, while Tommy Lee still looks vile and combat-ready. Even funnier: of all the people interviewed, a remarkably self-confident and unpretentious Sebastian Bach is the most articulate and uncomplicated. Who would have guessed?

A nearly audible "a-ha!" from the VH1 offices can be detected, as in that moment, they seem to notice how they can finally control the megabeast they are documenting: treat it as the product of outrage and rebellion, so they cannot take it seriously. Marketers and the underconfident only like what they can control. No one is surprised when they bypass black metal.

Despite these flaws, for what it does document, this film covers it well. Marilyn Manson is presented as an intelligent iconoclast, and the musicians who can spit out a coherent thought are given air time in support of the nodal points of metal history as relayed by the narrator. It documents the rise of mainstream heavy metal through its motivations and the political and social context around it, and thanks to its perception of metal's psychology as a hurt child, it gives it credit for its commentary on that context.

The focus -- Black Sabbath, NWOBHM, glam metal, stadium metal, and nu metal -- shows how deeply entrenched the industry is in clamping down on any artistically motivated genre, making its own cheesy but more populist version, and then reselling it while re-writing history to obscure the truth. The artistic versions of metal are neglected, and even if one doesn't have rancor toward Tommy Lee of Motley Crue, hearing him describe himself as an "artist" will make even the most tolerant crack a wry smile.

While these flaws weaken the documentary, and disable it more in post-viewing analysis when the viewer realizes the documentary's weaknesses stem from a desire to productize one of the last un-zombie'd genres, "Heavy: The Story of Metal" has many positive factors, not least of all the simplest: the people who made it clearly enjoy metal music and wanted to portray it in a positive light, even if their definition of positive was twisted by their pocketbook fears.

For the first video review to ever grace these pages a film was chosen that is valuable for the conclusions gleaned from its perception, and not necessarily the art of moviemaking exhibited. Following the pattern of most first films, this work starts with a group of characters and mocks them in their ouroboric paths to nowhere. In doing so, it reveals something of the nature of the metal community itself, both through its dominant symbols - drugs, masturbation, anger, fatalism - and through its own fascination and the conclusion it is able to draw.

Shot in conveniently sparse videocam, the movie romps through a series of goofy but enjoyable skits and long derangements of the senses synchronized in form to music, giving it the feeling of a music video + home video + low-budget film in one. Of note are musical choices, which showcase a DJ's eye for context. There is ample T&A of a tame variety and gratifying indulgence in all forms of base humor, including masturbation, fecalism and amusing violence. Highlights include a series of blown-out female characters who are preachy but have the sexual ethics of a Grimoire Girl(tm), a fantastically fascist cop played by Craig Pillard, and several utterly believable stoner/metalhead characters who wander around in a haze of mostly their own creation. Absent is any moralism regarding the world around us; it is nice to escape that moralistic confine in which most contemporary filmic art is launched.

Another highlight is "Ox," who barges his way onto the set and provides one of the most believable character satires of pure rampaging destruction in human form yet found. Toward the beginning and end of the film, when it needs extra impetus, there is booster rocket material from what are now basic digital editing effects, which to the director's credit are often quite cleverly applied ("making the most of what you have"). Is the movie "good"? No and yes. It's hard to sit through some of this; the scenes are long and often tediously embarrassing to the degree that sympathy is lost for the characters and even the joke. As a whole, the plot is light, with three or four major devices and a linear narrative based on its precepts. It's sometimes difficult to watch from a combination of ineptitude and padding. However, it is "good" in that this movie has a large amount of perceptive content for a cut-up laugh fest, and while its methods and often gags are cheap and sometimes predictable, they're carried out with a unique flair and nurture for the humor involved.

Like any modern comedy, the plot is a container for almost granularized skits woven roughly into the context of the people who drive changes in the action, and this approach works for the scattershot method required to address the diverse complexity of intellectual representation of external reality in this era. The acting isn't great, but Zebub himself is a high-energy riot of comedic momentum who can be witty in a pinch, or subtly humorous over the length of a scene. His supporting cast perform well compared to many card-carrying actors and, while like in the movie itself we can see rough edges there are imperfections galore, they link up in the film like prisoner sex. While this movie gets a somewhat ambivalent recommendation, the idea of pursuing the next professional offering from Bill Zebub is not at all ambiguous to this reviewer.

This hand-filmed, single-camera narrative documents a time when underground music was still struggling to find its path, and while the quality may not be that of a slick professional recording, the delivery of the band is captured in as much detail as is needed. The sound, when it is not cutting out, is good and separation between instruments and vocals can be heard clearly. Glenn Danzig is an energetic vocalist without either the jaded reserve or overindulgent showmanship of later years, and the crowd looks shellshocked and unsure of what they're seeing, which has the advantage of them doing fewer stupid things to mar enjoyment of the performance. The band are economical with their onstage motions, and tight in their playing, which gives these songs the same power they have coming off of a CD. An enclosed sticker provokes some nostalgia for the time, an age of xeroxed posters and grimly absurd art, of people gathering in long-forgotten clubs to bash out violent performances. For those who like what Samhain were about, this DVD is everything that could be desired from this foundational band.

Despite the cheesy low-budget titles which preceded the actual performance, this video is quite competent. Video quality is high, color balance is good, and sound is as near to pristine as one can get through this medium. The problem is that it is filmed like a Bon Jovi live set, with too much focus on the vocalist and a total shortage of the crucial closeups of guitar playing that should accompany performances by people renowned for their instrumental ability. Is that rocket science, or what? We get plenty of wide-stage views and frontal closeup of "emotional" moments during the singing, but a fault of tight shots and creative angles. Tastefully the filmmakers avoid too much crowd interaction, which is smart since if one's best qualification is having bought a ticket, it is probably not a sign that one has much to say/gesture of note. For this reviewer, the music on this DVD was too much of the hard rock variety, but it is clear that the performers are highly talented and it is hoped that with their next video release, there will be more focus on things of interest to musicians or people who simply admire classic guitar playing.

Few underground bands will achieve a video document of this quality. It consists entirely of MTV-style song videos, professionally filmed and edited, which are either miniature movies in which the band is featured or high quality live recordings. The sound quality is excellent, as is the image quality, but having someone take the time to edit and shape the video experience as one might find in a cinema puts these in a different league. However, this DVD has a weak spot, and it is the choice of material. Where a disc of sloppier and less coherent videos from classic Danzig, namely the first two albums, would be a gigantic hit, there's only one song from that era on here, and while the material from his later albums is good, it's also more typical hard rock/heavy metal and thus does not show this band at their most adept and inventive phase. Furthermore, this DVD is literally an archive, and gives us six songs with up to three versions of the video for each, which makes it not only unsuitable for casual viewing but very limited. Couldn't someone tack on some crappy handheld video of a live set at the end, as, well, that would be more the whole of the Danzig experience than this narrow snapshot? The videos are quite artistic, and feature heavy symbolism and plenty of evil moments. It culminates in "Mother '93," which is essentially the album track dubbed over some hammy but expertly edited live video. If you are a Danzig fanatic, this provides you with the videos you saw on MTV and the uncensored versions that you probably wanted desperately at the time. For the more casual fan, this video will probably seem like a hasty and unthinking compilation of material that documents the less triumphant moments of an otherwise influential act.