Very classic film for me growing up in Port Hueneme in 70s & later on a bit Oxnard in 80s.
Ain't gonna lie.. i was bullied by punks in 80s. They were not cool. Pot heads & glue sniffers who just wanted to fight , mosh & steal my skateboard. That I bought (Neil Bender coffee hobo dude deck, Tracker trucks & Slimeballs wheels) for about $110 while working at The Navy Exchange aged 13 making $3.35 a hour. Marc Enis stole my shit outta Biology class & I saw him riding it to school the next day!!
Port Hueneme HS 1987, super call out.. cancel culture bullshit happening here rn!
Trigger meme.
Punks sucked till Bad Brains & Minor Threat started a new youth movement. Straight edge.
This is more than a quick recommendation for an early Los Angeles punk film. It is a small piece of lived punk history from someone who encountered the culture first as a kid living near it, not as a later collector studying photographs and record sleeves. The skateboard details matter: the deck, trucks, wheels, price, low hourly wage and work required to obtain it turn the theft from a generic teenage grievance into something physical. That board contained labor, independence, taste and the private pride of a thirteen-year-old who had assembled an identity with money he earned himself. Seeing the person who stole it riding it to school the following day is the kind of image that does not require literary decoration. The cruelty is already perfectly composed.
The post also complicates the pleasant historical picture sometimes painted around early punk. A scene may later be remembered for creativity, freedom and resistance while having felt very different to a younger person standing near its edges. The punks described here were not automatically enlightened because they dressed against the mainstream. They could be bullies, thieves and intoxicated young men using an alternative culture as another place to practice domination. The story does not reject punk. It explains why Bad Brains and Minor Threat felt like a genuine change: they suggested that the energy could be separated from drunkenness, cruelty and compulsory self-destruction.
That distinction gives the few sentences unusual historical value. Straight edge is not introduced as an abstract subgenre or a list of restrictions. It appears as an answer to an actual social environment, a new youth movement that made punk imaginable for people who did not want to become the sort of punks who had terrorized them. The music offered another way to possess intensity without surrendering awareness, and another way to rebel without reproducing the behavior of the person who steals a younger kid’s skateboard.
The post’s abrupt ending belongs to the same truth. Two complete DVD images are offered as enormous ISO files, followed by the wonderfully honest question, “what does that even mean?!!” The person preserving the film does not need to pretend mastery over every technical container carrying it. Curiosity and commitment are enough. The movie mattered, the memory attached itself to the movie, and both were placed here for somebody else to discover. A polished streaming interface might provide the film more conveniently, but it could never provide this route into it: Port Hueneme, the Navy Exchange, a stolen skateboard, punk’s capacity for both ugliness and transformation, and one person still carrying the whole collision decades later.
