Saturday Night Is Movie Night...

I'll be watching Eraserhead on DVD but I'd rather be watching, Ladies & Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

This was a favorite movie of mine many years ago. I first saw it on Night Flight, an old cable show that showed great uncut, unedited videos and movies geared to the 80's youth. This 1981 movie starred Diane Lane who played Corrine Burns who starts her own band, The Fabulous Stains, after her mother's death. The Stains get their first taste of success tagging along with a punk band, The Looters, and a busload of fading rockers — the appropriately named Metal Corpses headed by Fee Waybill from The Tubes and a British band composed of ex-Sex Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones and Clash bassist Paul Simonon. In the inexplicable way such things happen, Corinne and her pals leapfrog the men and become overnight stars, in spite of sounding much like the early Shaggs.

Seeing as the band lacks talent, Corinne pioneers an apparently unforgettable look — "skunk" hairdo, lightning eye makeup, little black lace panties — and follows up the image by verbally assaulting her audience and droning songs with too apt titles like "I’m a Waste of Time." She energizes what looks like an army of teen girls, who become clones of her right down to the hair and panties and duplicitous screaming mantra "We don’t put out!"

It's a cult classic never released by Paramount and went straight to tv but recently was released in limited quantities on DVD and I've been trying to get my hands on a copy at a reasonable price with no luck. I'm currently in yet another ebay bidding war as we speak so if anyone knows where I can get an unedited copy, let me know and if you get a chance to see it, do so.