LOS ANGELES — Cult film director Gustav Heinrik’s latest project “Black Sabbath: Go Heavy or Go Home” shines new light on the idea that the previous Sabbath documentary, 2021’s “The Heavy, Hard Way Home,’ got everything about right, confirmed multiple denim vest-clad sources.
“This new documentary follows on the heels of the last one and it really helped illuminate the fact that almost everything that needs to be said about Sabbath has been said. There really isn’t any new information on these guys that anyone is digging up. And this doc didn’t even interview any band members, it just showed old photos and video footage,” said longtime Sabbath fan Tony Ortleib. “‘Go Heavy or Go Home,’ did have a 17-minute blooper reel from ‘The Osbournes’ where Ozzy seemed unhappy about the cameras. That was pretty groundbreaking for Sabbath docs, but just as I’d suspected not much was going on with them.”
Heinrik himself echoed Ortleib’s sentiment that the new project subverts expectations of what a “new” documentary should be — namely, new.
“Sure, it says everything the past few documentaries said about the band. But now we have Alice Cooper saying it. Now we have a friend of Lars Ulrich saying it. We’ve all heard the story of Ozzy biting the head off a bat during a show in Des Moines. But have we heard Rob Halford of Judas Priest retell it? No. Not in the past fifteen years, at least,” Heinrik said, referring to the 2008 documentary ‘Black Sabbath: Hard and Heavy,’ in which Halford retells the ‘bat’ story. Heinrik uses that footage in his new documentary. “My only regret was the fact I couldn’t get Bruce Dickinson to talk about the time Ozzy pissed on the Alamo.”
Sabbath biographer Trent Billman noted that even the footage used in the documentary isn’t new — “which is new.”
“What do we know about Black Sabbath now that we didn’t know before?” asks Billman. “Nothing, except maybe that the song ‘Paranoid’ was once titled ‘The Paranoid.’ Is that riveting? You tell me. And then we get this beautiful quote from Ozzy: ‘I never thought of us as a band. Tommy, Geezer, and I? We were one living machine. And we were all out there getting crucified and resurrected every night.’ I just hope we can all move on to another metal band to chronicle. There are plenty of ‘90s bands ripe for the taking.”
At press time, Heinrik announced he would be starting his new project, a shot-by-shot recreation of 2021’s “Becoming Led Zeppelin.”