HEAVY TRAFFIC (Ralph Bakshi, 1973)

Man, this thing blew my mind when my buddy Marty showed it to me in high school. I hadn't seen it for about 10 years and I didn't know how it'd hold up, but I watched it last night and I still think it's brilliant.

I always though Bakshi's first movie "Fritz The Cat" (a film adaptation of the Robert Crumb comics) was pretty corny, but that was really a director for hire job. After that was a success, he had the juice to make the movie he'd wanted to in the first place, Heavy Traffic.

It's violent and grotesque and definitely lacking in subtlety, but it's also funny and smart and beautiful and wild and creative and funky and eye popping and just so 70s noo yawk. It's no wonder when I finally visited New York in the 2000s I was kinda disappointed. It was like, "This ain't how I imagined it from watching Heavy Traffic over and over as a teenager!"

Oh yeah, and there's a lot of tits. Fabulous cartoon tits of all shapes and sizes that have that special cartoon sense of physics that makes them pop out of bras with a great thwacking sound.

So to report, Heavy Traffic is still great, i'm still in love with Carol, the bit pictured above with all the reversed models laughing at Michael is still freaky, everything is as it should be.

I had this on VHS for years (with that yellow cover up there!) and put it on the street along with all my other VHS tapes when I moved recently, hopefully some teenage kid with a VCR picked it up and is getting his brain fried by it right now (not bloody likely).

Thankfully the whole thing is on youtube in pretty good quality, so load it up, turn out the lights, get a little high if that's what you like to a do before a freaky movie, and enjoy!