Critic's Review
Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
This is exactly the sort of thing DVDs were made for. The Residents' Icky Flix collects all of their videos, starting with 1976's "The Third Reich and Roll" and continuing through to "concentrates" of the group's CD-ROMs The Gingerbread Man and Bad Day at the Midway that were completed in 2000. Not only that, the disc adds on a brilliant, terrifying, and impossibly rare video by their Ralph Records compatriots Renaldo and the Loaf, "Songs for Swinging Larvae," and a new edit of the legendary never-completed film Vileness Fats. Most impressively, the separate audio tracks for each film give the viewer the choice of hearing either the original soundtrack for each video or a newly recorded (and in most cases, radically altered) version of the music. Not only that, but the group also created four brand new videos for older pieces of music, including 1978's "Constantinople," 1992's "He Also Serves" and "Kick a Picnic," and 1999's "Burn Baby Burn." The videos are exquisitely restored. "The Third Reich and Roll" is presented in color (previous video collections had featured a black-and-white print; ironically, everything in the entire video is either black or white) with its original end titles. The Vileness Fats footage looks worlds better than it had on 1984's haphazard Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?, and the tighter edit makes the story simultaneously more linear and more disturbing. The digitally remastered soundtracks are similarly excellent. No Residents fan should be without this disc.
