DVD: MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
(Music Video Distributors)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

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There is one way you'd be likely to find this film entertaining, and it would involve ingesting far too many hallucinogens for your own good. What a mess. While we can agree that these are home movies of the band in concert over the years, including a few sequences showing them as school kids playing a dance, you'd be hard pressed to convince me or anyone else that those films actually correspond to the soundtrack. You don't have to be a musician to catch an allegedly screaming vocalist with his mouth closed. This is what it is, and this is all it is, and on it goes from home movie to home movie, offering its only real value when it gives us never before seen moments with Wayne Kramer, Fred Sonic Smith and the boys. But by the time it sputters to a close, even the shock has worn off, leaving us to search online for other DVDs that might give us a real feeling of what this amazing American pre-punk band might have been like in concert. The thoroughly annoying and embarrassing interview with former MC5 manager John Sinclair seems nearly as disconnected and bizarre as the main feature. The guy sits in a restaurant booth, eating, drinking and belching up a storm then giggling about it like a school boy. He says "THIS'LL end up on the cutting room floor, huh?" From the looks of this whole project, they don't have one.

© 2005 - DJ Johnson