oftend In the 80s, there were some REALLY good movies about the underground music/art scene - Mondo New York, Decline of Western Civilization and Urgh! (just to name a few) but Urgh! takes the cake for me. I put it above the rest because it's all JUST about the music. No blah blah blah...no commercial bull flop - no NOTHING but music and some of the AMAZING musicians that were out performing at the time.I did not like the Police getting 3 tracks however. That smacked of some favoritism but since they were the deep pockets at the time, anything less probably would have resulted in no movie at all. That's why God gave us the Fast Forward and Skip buttons I believe. LOL.Watching this movie gives you a brief albeit somewhat lacking skim of the entire punk/new wave scene at the time, but given the ocean of music that was out there when I was a young pup, it's probably the best possible collaboration given the time and money available for production. It is a MUST VIEW for any music aficionado. Rapidly moving from Wall of Voodoo to Pere Ubu to XTC to OMD and on and on and on is like watching your young life go by (if you were born in the 60s *grin*) on Fast Forward and it is WONDERFUL! That said, it's heartbreaking now to see how young and talented all those folks were and how few remain relevant today...but music today is EXACTLY what Jello Biafra predicted in would be: "If you don't keep your eyes open...you'll be forced to buy skinny tie...pop bands". Well, the skinny ties are mostly gone - but today's bubblegum, idiotic pop music is all powerful and sickening - gone is the creative, roaring flame of the late 70s/early 80s music scene - replaced with vapidness like Britney Spears et al.Urgh! was and still is a testament to what great music and culture are all about. It's an irreproducible miracle of the modern age and we will never see anything like it again short of a new age of enlightenment affecting all mankind. Find it! Watch it! PRESERVE it! COVET IT!! I give it two thumbs up, a snap, a circle twist and 4 zillion stars.

YourReporter This is the ultimate rock movie. It shows how not all rock is about cars, chicks and having fun, it can be about psychosis, political commitment, alienation and all other aspects covered by traditional arts. This makes the movie rather deep; although some performances are rather shallow, the diversity of artistic directions are undeniable, and makes for a great experience and recurring afterthought. The level of experimenting is intense, from the psychotics of Pere Ubu and John Cooper Clarke, via the eerie sceneries of Gary Numan and Gang of Four, to the mutated rock of Devo and Klaus Nomi. A must-see. -r3port3r

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.

jeff667 An excellent picture of what the punk/new wave scene was before the sound got co-opted by the mainstream. The Devo live performance really rocks, and you get to see many smaller artists that got overlooked when this genre took over the top 40. It really shows you how much fun and interesting music can be when it isn't being pushed by big labels and a band's sound can be created naturally without pressure to meet a certain standard. Last I saw it aired on the Sundance Channel.