Nonureva Really Surprised!

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

preppy-3 This is a crash course in the punk and New Wave music of the early 80s. It's basically a concert film--one band after another is shoved in the audiences' face. It's bookended by the Police who open and close the movie.I'm one of the few people who actually caught this in a movie theatre back in 1981. I was in college and figured the movie might work. I was wrong! The movie was in stereo which was cranked up full blast! I realized VERY quickly that I was not into this type of music at all. Twice I tried to walk out but I couldn't. I'm not kidding when I say the music was so loud it forced you to stay in your seat! By the end of the movie I literally staggered out of the theatre with my hearing almost gone and in shock. So this is obviously not for everyone.Still if you're into this type of music you might like it. Some of the acts weren't bad and it was fun to see the Go-Gos and Joan Jett before they hit it big. Proceed at your own risk.Beware of edited prints. I've heard some of the more extreme acts (which gave the film an R rating) are removed from the TV print.

momentoflifebeginningofterror I think this rates higher than the collective score, but that's just my opinion. The previous comments from The Police fan aside, this is a great collection of live performances. I like The Police, but if it weren't included on URGH! it would be fine by me. It does look dated, but so do performances by Elvis and The Beatles and nobody complains about that. It's worth looking at again if you've seen it and seeing for the first time if you haven't. If you like the New-Wave-Post-Punk world of the early 80's I think you will rate it higher. The Fleshtones, Echo & The Bunnyman, Wall of Voodoo, Devo, Gary Numan and OMD are favourites of mine. The Cramps are a must see. I've seen them live and they are ultra weird and great performers. From what I remember, the soundtrack has more songs than the movie did, but I may be mistaken.

EL BUNCHO I am now 36 years old and grew up during the disco era, a time formerly considered to be the worst ever in popular music. Since I couldn't deal with the constant disco, I turned to '50's oldies and the emerging punk/new wave scene to save my musical sanity. During that time, I bought the soundtrack album to URGH! and loved nearly every second of it. However, the film itself never played near me, even at the local "oddball" theater and so I assumed that it was doomed to languish in obscurity.Skip ahead to 1985 and the late, lamented NIGHT FLIGHT program that ran on the USA network on weekend late-nights. NIGHT FLIGHT ran tons of off the wall movies and music shows that were clearly geared for a late-high school and college age audience who more than likely did a lot of drugs. They surprised the hell out of me and my stoner pals by announcing "Up next: the strange world of the punk and new wave scene with URGH! A MUSIC WAR!" I took off like a shot (knocking over the bong and royally pissing off my dorm mates) for the campus store to obtain a blank video tape, and made it back with about two minutes to spare. The trip was worth it, as I witnessed live performances of 32 (!!!) different bands, quite a few of whom I already loved and several more that I discovered that night.The film chronicles performances from the US and Europe during 1980/81 and though fun, the results are wildly uneven. Here's the bottom line on acts you should not miss: Devo (turning in a kickass version of "Uncontrollable Urge" which really captures how hard they rocked in those days), the Go-Gos (before their first album came out, and when Belinda Carlisle was still chunky doing "We Got the Beat"), Joan Jett (burning up the screen with "Bad Reputation" in her pre-weight loss, pre- "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" days), The Cramps (will Lux Interior's johnson flop out of his silver stretch-pants while performing "Tear It Up"?), Oingo Boingo (turning in an absolutely electrifying version of "Ain't This the Life?" in which Danny Elfmman looks both insane and possessed), Skafish (doing "Sign of the Cross" and featuring Jim Skafish, perhaps the ugliest frontman ever), the Dead Kennedys ( a great rendition of "Bleed For Me"), Klaus Nomi (hands-down the strangest act in this flick, and that's really saying something. He performs "Total Eclipse" in a shattering falsetto, complete with Teutonic accent, and a spaceman/mime/drag queen outfit), XTC ("Respectable Street" as it was truly meant to be heard), X ("Beyond and Back"), 999 ("Homicide"), Magazine ("Model Worker"), Steel Pulse ("Ku Klux Klan") and UB40 (doing the unjustly forgotten "Madame Medusa").There is a lot of filler and crap, but that may just be my opinion; you may dig the the stuff I hate, so who knows? If you can find this, rent it and sit back for a unique time capsule of the early '80's when pop music made it's last stand to be interesting.

icehole4 Although it may seem dated now, in its time this was a collection of some of the best bands that were "out there," the most commercial being the Police and the Go-Go's. It also offers a very rare insight into seeing XTC live [which hasn't occurred since this video was released.]Sadly impossible to find now, it was really worthwhile to see in the early 1980's. Maybe someone like Rhino will pick up on this and release it again...