Somewhere under Times Square, hundreds of meters below Carson Daly”s trendy feet, there is a dark damp room, a cemetary of sorts, a dying ground of old MTV videos, the final resting place of M C Hammer and Vanilla Ice among others. With ever increasing profits to be had within the music industry, the death of the music video is no longer so final. In what is starting to become a common occurrence, old videos are finding themselves resurrected on video or DVD form. Poison”s complete video collection has found new life on DVD in a release accordingly titled Greatest Video Hits.
- Paul Wong
- Courtesy of Capitol
Everything remains untouched just the way Poison was left in the mid-80s, the gargantuan hair, choreographed ridiculousness, tire-sized hoop earrings and enough makeup to kill fifty lab monkeys. Many of the videos were MTV staples such as fabulously flaky favorites like “Talk Dirty to Me,” “Nothin” but a Good Time,” “Unskinny Bop” and Monster Ballad beauties such as “Every Rose has its Thorn” and “Something to Believe In.” Scattered between video clips lie backstage footage and interviews with the band and road crew. The interview segments are like vegetables in a beef stew, nothing but filler.
To someone who didn”t live through the Poison party the first time around the DVD can get a bit tiring. While the videos are saturated with salaciously sexy innuendo, spinning microphone stands, motorcycles, pyro and pretty girls, each video is unabashedly similar to the prior and unfailingly analogous to the subsequent video. Luckily when the eyes tire of the glut of glamour on the screen they can flip off the TV and turn up the stereo system because the DVD features 5.1 surround sound. Like any poison, this one can put the mind into a pleasurable altered state but too much can lead to a possibly fatal dose of boredom.