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BIG. LOUD AND JOYFULLY STUPID
Here is my brilliant career in the movies
in a nutshell: I was an extra for one day in
a movie called Voyage of the Rock Aliens. It
was the mid-'80s, and we had a friend who
was really into this girl who was working on
the movie, which was shooting on location
at an Atlanta high school, so he talked us
into going down to be part of the climac
tic scene where the Rock Aliens appear at
the Big School Dance. When we got there,
Wardrobe dressed all of us "punky." I ended
up in a humiliating sleeveless checkerboard
muscle shirt and a skinny piano tie. Not ev/?n
remotely punk, I was dressed barely New Wave.
As Johnny Slash used to say, "Totally different
head. Totally."
Once on the set I deliberately took up a
position close to the lights, so if you ever see
the movie, it's highly unlikely you'll see me or
my laughable version of the '80s-White-Boy
Dance. But it was interesting to watch a movie
being shot, and I got to share the same oxy
gen as the lovely and talented Pia Zadora for a
few moments, so it was all worthwhile, right?
The reason I bring up Voyage of the Rock
Aliens, starring Pia, Jermaine Jackson and
Academy Award winner Ruth Gordon in her
soul-destroying final performance, is that this
steaming turdburger of a movie is included
in the new film guide Destroy All Movies!!!:
The Complete Guide to Punks on Film
(Faritagraphic Books, 2010), so you know
the guide is truly encyclopedic. Editors Zack
Carlson and Bryan Connelly and a team of
writers have produced a huge, comprehensive
handbook to all movies from 1974 to 1999
that have, for good or ill, featured punks as
characters or atmosphere. The result is a love
letter to all things punk, sardonic in tone, lav
ishly illustrated and filled with very cool inter
views with directors and stars that you won't
find anywhere else.
As punk was a reaction to the plasticized,
corporate, disco-fied veneer slapped on top_
of (often literally and tragically) bankrupt
culture on both sides of the Atlantic in the
1970s and *BQs, pop media reacted with the
kind of unintentional irony only it ran cough
up. "Punk* became a cartoonish shorthand for
everything that had gone wrong in society,
the cause rather than the effect. Want to show
that Charles Bronson is in the wrong part of
town? Show some mohawks in the alley. Want
to show how bad your post-apocalyptic.sci-fi
movie world is? Dress everyone in leather and
spikes. How dysfunctional is the relationship
between your TV dad and his darling daugh
ter? Check out the pierced cretin she just
brought home—hilarious!
Carlson, Connelly and their crew spent ages
sifting through piles of this dreck to find and
point out everywhere Hollywood and their
Z-grade cousins got it wrong (like the "punk"
girl in Crocodile Dundee in the Twisted Sister
T-shirt—what?) but also got to revisit a lot of
groundbreaking but underap
preciated films that rarely
get talked about anymore,
with a unique perspective
that will make you want
to visit or revisit them. I
mean, this book makes a
compelling argument in
favor of Penelope Spheeris'
punk western Dudes, with
Jon Cryer, a feat I would
have previously thought
impossible.
Of course, many pages are
devoted to Spheeris' seminal
film Suburbia, as well as Alex
Cox's masterpiece (yeah, I
said it) Repo Man, which the
authors rightfully liked much
better than the movie that
will forever be Cox's alba
tross, Sid and Nancy. Liquid
Sky, a film I never cared for
but which is nonetheless
vital in this subgenre, gets a
close examination, as do two
surprising entries, the high-
school-vigilante film Class of
1984 and Valley Girt which
gets props for being one of
the very few movies with punks as major char
acters who are sympathetic and thoroughly
three-dimensional. Other entries deal with
largely forgotten but absolutely vital films like
Ladies and Gentlemen—The Fabulous Stains
and the epic concert film Urgh! A Music War.
Nice, if too short, interviews are conducted
with Spheeris, Cox and many other filmmak
ers and actors here, but the two best are the
staffs conversations with Allan Arkush, direc
tor of "the Ramones movie" Rock and Roll High
School and the lesser-known but still amazing
Get Crazy (Lou Reed parodies Dylan and a guy
dressed as a giant joint gets gang-smoked—
trust me; it's awesome), and Mary Woronov,
the Warhol muse who went on to appear in
more movies you love than you can remember.
Destroy All Movies!!! is that very rare thing
in publishing, a book you didn't know you
needed until someone wrote it I certainly
didn't, and now I'm findingjt indispensable.
It's an absolute must-have for cult-movie fans,
movie trivia buffs, aspiring filmmakers and
everyone who feels that punk never got its
fair due for revolutionizing music and shaking
up the status quo. I especially recommend it
to wardrobe supervisors, so that no innocent
extra need ever again suffer as I did that fate
ful day, because even now I grieve for the star
I might have become if not for a muscle shirt
and a skinny tie.
M John G. Netties
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