Welcome to the machine: Video nasty

The very first video tape I ever bought with my own money was a copy of Dawn of the Dead, but the first brand new one was The Wall movie, from the video shop at the front of the Stafford Mall in Timaru. It cost $35 in 1990 money, but it was worth it. I'd hired out the film a few times, but I needed my own copy, to fuel this adolescent obsession with Pink Floyd that just wasn't dying.

When I was a lot younger, when I had no idea what a Pink Floyd was, the movie had been playing in some weird movie theatre behind a restaurant down south in Dunedin, and I'd sat there with my chicken nuggets and chips, mesmerized by the freaky-ass poster in the lobby, and I couldn't even imagine what lay behind that screaming image.

Years later, and all I listened to was Pink Floyd, so of course I needed the movie, and was delighted to find so much of it was just as freaky as that young kid in the restaurant had hoped it was. The tunes are comfortably familiar, but the imagery was deeply upsetting: maggots and industrial mincers and death and seventies haircuts and faceless masks and death and Bob Hoskins and death.

I highly recommend this movie to all teenagers, everywhere. It might be just what you need.