Why so much hype?

What makes it different from others?

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Because of an exclusive contract to publish this movie on a now dead format (CED), the contracts for the individual artists are missing. Because you can't renegotiate a contract without the original to amend, no one can touch this. Its currently owned by its original producer, Miles Copeland (founder of IRS records), and he has the film of THREE songs from each band in storage, but because of the legal land lock he cannot release it. If he does some day, we can look forward to a 6 hour 2 DVD special edition.Pretty sad to say the very least. We can only hope one day (soon) that the original contracts will be found as this will make a MAJOR DVD release!! Oh, human error!!

This movie is spectacular! It is a perfect snapshot of the post-punk/new-wave movement in the early 80's. Great performances by some well-known artists when they were still newcomers, and some other interesting bands that never quite made it.I had somehow not heard of this movie until it was long out of print - and it took a great deal of searching to track it down, but was well worth it. Seeing the Police, Devo, Gary Numan, Echo & The Bunnymen, X and all the other artists in their younger days is just amazing.Someone needs to sort out the legal crap and get this remastered and issued on DVD. It's way too hard to find it used or bootlegged - but it's too much a piece of music history to just disappear on worn-out VHS tapes.

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.

Fun to witness so many great and green acts in concerts ranging from 78-80. Its not a case of documentary movie making at its best - its a case of knowing what to film at the time. Kind of a Video-Montose67 for the 80's. Stewart Copeland and his brothers pick'm and I'm not sure how they missed the Dickies while getting the Dead Kennedys, Oingo, the Surf Punks, and the Cramps (boy, he loved his microphone). Pere Ubu - Birdies! As fun as it was in its day (81) its ten times that in retrospect.