According to Variety, Doppelgänger Releasing, the genre-focused label of Music Box Films, has acquired North American distribution rights to the sequel to the Finnish movie “Heavy Trip” about IMPALED REKTUM, an underground blackened death metal band and their search for their sound: symphonic, post-apocalyptic, reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme war pagan, Fennoscandian metal. Charades is handling world sales rights.
Released in 2018, “Heavy Trip”, a triumphant celebration of Scandinavian black and death metal, introduced us to the group which, for various reasons, had been stuck for 11 years practicing in a basement. The movie ends with IMPALED REKTUM finally performing in front of a receptive metal audience. The sequel, per writer/directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, opens a few years later with IMPALED REKTUM in jail and with an offer to play Germany’s Wacken Open Air festival. Unprepared and imprisoned, the band refuses the festival slot. However, the guitarist’s father goes ill and is in dire need as the family home and slaughterhouse are about to be demolished. Cue the music: time to get out of jail!
“Heavier Trip”‘s world premiere will be announced imminently followed by a theatrical and home entertainment release this November.
Laatio and Vidgren said in a statement: “If there’s one thing the world needs, it’s feel-good movies about dudes who play symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandic metal. We’re so excited to bring ‘Heavier Trip’ to audiences in North America and make lots of noise with this sequel’s release!”
Charades CEO Pierre Mazars said: “It’s a thrill to see ‘Heavier Trip’ being distributed in the U.S. Music Box Films and Doppelgänger Releasing‘s eclectic slate, spanning both demanding arthouse cinema and mainstream comedy, leaves no doubt about their ability to draw audiences to theaters. As a metal fan myself, I couldn’t be happier.”
Brian Andreotti of Music Box Films added: “We were proud to distribute ‘Heavy Trip’ and we still sport our t-shirts from IMPALED REKTUM‘s 2018 North American tour. We were excited to hear that Jukka and Juuso were working on a sequel, and the prospect of any other North American distributor trying to challenge our dominance in the symphonic post-apocalyptic, reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme war pagan Fennoscandic metal space was simply not an option. It’s been six years since IMPALED REKTUM conquered North America, and we can’t wait for their return this fall.”
“Heavier Trip” was funded from a consortium of international sources: Finland, Lithuania, Germany, Belgium, and Bulgaria. The sequel was filmed with a slight increase in the budget, which, according to Vidgren, we will see in production value, but, due to inflation, the additional funds, he says, didn’t stretch much further than the original movie’s budget. However, Laatio does say that this is a bigger movie. With the experience of making the first movie, they were able to, according to Juuso, “Squeeze the air out of the script pretty early, instead of cutting loads of shit in editing.”
With filming in their native Finland and at last year’s Wacken Open Air in Germany, an epic mud bath, Juuso confirmed to BLABBERMOUTH.NET that Mika Lammassaari (MORS SUBITA, ex-ETERNAL TEARS OF SORROW, ex-WOLFHEART) is writing “the band’s music, the heavier stuff. But we have Swedish occult rock band YEAR OF THE GOAT that’s doing the complete score for this film.” He continued: “This has been my 10-year plan, to collaborate with them somehow. I had to make the first film so that I had something to give them: ‘Would you, would you be in the second film?’ I’ve been a big, big fan of them for a long time, and this is a personal project in many ways for me. It fulfills a lot of my fanboy dreams.”
“Heavy Trip” debuted in 2018 at SXSW and was shown in select theaters in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and more, in conjunction with VOD platforms. The sequel has been in the works for six years, with Juuso and Jukka writing and securing funding since the completion of the last movie.
Helmed by first-time feature filmmakers, the original “Heavy Trip” movie was a satire about the aforementioned metal band’s efforts to land its first legitimate gig. In the film, Turo (Johannes Holopainen) is stuck in a small village in the Finnish countryside where his greatest passion is being the lead vocalist for the group IMPALED REKTUM. The only problem is that he and his fellow headbangers have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. But that’s all about to change when the guys meet the promoter of a huge heavy metal music festival in Norway and decide it’s now or never. Hitting the road in a stolen van with a corpse, a coffin, and a new drummer from a local mental hospital in tow, IMPALED REKTUM travels across Scandinavia to make its dreams a reality. This road trip comedy includes a musical brotherhood, grave robbing, Viking heaven, and an armed conflict between Finland and Norway.
According to Juuso, who is a longtime metal fan, “Heavy Trip” initially bombed in Finland, which is widely considered to be the most heavy metal country in the world.
“Nobody went to see it in the Finnish cinemas,” Juuso told Metal Hammer magazine in a June 2022 interview. “It was marketed very poorly and to the wrong audience; it was marketed to 15-year-olds but it’s not a film for them. They don’t know the metal references and they don’t listen to metal anyway. After the failed opening, it was pretty much, ‘Well, there goes our career. Nobody’s going to work with us again.'”
Kai Nordberg and Kaarle Aho reportedly produced the original “Heavy Trip” for Making Movies on a budget of $3.6 million, financed by the Finnish Film Foundation, YLE and Film Camp.
“Heavy Trip” currently has a 94% critic score from 32 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the online review aggregation service that allows both critics and the public to rate movies. The same site has an 83% audience score for “Heavy Trip” from more than 250 reviews.
“We have the craziest fans in Japan,” Juuso told Metal Hammer. “They have cosplay over there and one guy cosplayed as the speed camera! And they had special screenings where the music is turned up extra loud. There’s a crazy ‘Heavy Trip’ scene over there.”
