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Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats VHS

Rev. Syung Myung Me: This is awful. This tape is split into two halves; the first half is The Mole Show, the second is Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats, and neither half is good. The Mole Show has awful sound, and you don't actually get to SEE anything, because not only has the show been edited into a half-hour long program with very little in the way of attention paid to the story or anything, but most of it is lousy animation made with a Video Toaster, primarily of squiggles. Every so often, a drawing of a Mole or Chub might flash, and there might be a quick cut to someone doing something on stage, but that's about it. This was the first thing that made me think the Residents couldn't do a live video to save their lives.

Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats is only slightly better – it's a half-hour edit of the film that they were working on (and never finished despite shooting something absurd like 2 weeks' worth of footage, which only told 2/3s of the story), but they pulled all the audio and dialogue out and replaced it with new instrumental music; the story is already pretty lost, but the long shots of dialogue that you can't hear makes the entire experience a particular brand of boring frustration. The Residents put out a 15 minute edit of this on Icky Flix, which was a bit better, and if I recall, the New Soundtrack actually had more in the way of the original dialogue, but the main advantage of the new edit is that it was shorter. It would be interesting to see a finished version of this, but I don't think it would be "interesting" as in "entertaining".

Basically, if you're new to the Residents and come across a copy of this, just keep on walkin'. Hell, if you're already an established hardcore fan of the Residents and see a copy of this, keep on walkin'. It's really not very good.