From The Vault - Lilac Time

PurpleReign (1984)

Starring: The Prince, The Prince Directed by: Alberto Magnolia Rating: R Genre: Musical Other

From The Vault - From The Vault is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies past that we feel might interest, provoke or dismay our readers. Review The One-Formerly-Known-As-Some-Kind-Of-Weird-Symbol-Like-Thing burst upon the scene like a purple dandelion spraying its allergy-inducing achenes machine-gun fashion into the eye-and-earholes of a stunned generation. But just as the milky-white liquid that flows from the crushed stems of this leafless flower are bitter, so was the youth of our foppish maestro. The Prince was clearly raised to blow the roof off the sucka, but like all great artists of his age (e.g. George Clinton, Stephen Hawking) he had to bleed so that others could live off of his blood while he could only suffer the little children. We know all of that, so what does "PurpleReign" bring to the party? Gigantic Amazon Dumbell Appollonia, for one. She strides across the screen like a collossus, The Prince hanging from her hip like some withered siamese twin. Not since The Stingk ("Before Guitar Hero: The John Dowland Story") managed to mangle his only three words in "Dune" has an actor so confused the trochaic and anapestic meters. Ever the contrarian, Prince introduced an entire generation to Morris Day and Jerome's diaper dance - for what were we in those days if not petulant teenagers unready to leave the dance floor even when nature's call was announced via  bullhorn? And thus was revealed the secret of "Hammer Time"! Obviously I was enthralled by this movie. Watching it again via XBox360/Netflix's wonderful "Party" mode with my significant other, we felt as though our tongues were meeting across 5000 miles of the internet's magical tubes. The Prince has a way of making us all feel as though we were little, little people climbing on top of sexier, bigger people and those bigger people are not complaining because we are so talented, rich and famous. If only James Brown had been twice as crazy and half as small, there might not have been a need for the Velour Viking. Thank god he never was!