Can’t get out of bed because you woke up drunk and your back hurts from too much pogo? Or maybe you’re about to host a rock’n’roll benefit for Palestine and need some cool retro reels to project behind the bands… whatever the occasion, we are pleased to bring you the CrimethInc. Ex-Worker Podcast’s year-end top 10 punk films we watched in 2024.

In addition to consuming dozens of hours of punks on screen, we made our own film this year. Fell In Love With Fire is a full length documentary about the six months of anarchy and chaos that reigned over Chile after triumphant rioters took control of the streets. Check it out!

10 - Good Vibrations [2012]

A true story, and the name says it all. At the height of The Troubles, Terri Hooley—an indomitably idealistic reggae lover—opens up a record store in the middle of Belfast’s bombed out city center. The scene of rebel rockers that crops up around the shop doesn’t fit into any of the social or political binaries of its environment. As Joe Strummer put it, “Between the bombing and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, [Belfast] punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious, burning moment.”

John Peel plays THE UNDERTONES’ “Teenage Kicks” on the BBC, and its so nice he plays it twice.

Royal Ulster Constabulary pigs are confounded when they pull over RUDI and THE OUTCASTS’ tour van to find a mix of Protestant and Catholic kids.

At a big-occasion, beyond-capacity benefit show to save the Good Vibrations record store, the shop’s accountant confronts Hooley because his NOTAFLOF guest list has resulted in financial loss. “The whole point of tonight was to raise money for your shop.” Terri looks out over the crowd of kids singing along with arms over each other. “No, it wasn't, not the whole point. Money couldn't buy what we've just done.”

I’ve always felt like stories that begin before punk existed and show its genesis are particularly well-poised to capture its spirit, and this film does a good job of showing how DIY gave punk its power from the very beginning.

A feel-good flick you could watch with your fucking grandmother.

9 - El Pico [1983]

Gritty, grey, and morally ambiguous. NOT a feel-good flick.

Just a few years after the fall of Franco, the teenage son of a fascist police captain befriends his opposite number, the son of a left-wing politician in the Basque Country of Spain. However, the friendship isn’t based in a love of punk or any of the wholesome idealism found in Good Vibrations. The pair lie, steal, and kill in pursuit of their
accelerating heroin addiction.

Be warned—the syringe shots are slow, intense, and sleazily seductive. A “police kill and torture” banner at a city-wide street festival gives you a sense of the social force that the Basque freedom struggle commanded during the film’s era. There’s an artsy gay sex pad and a ménage à trois in the gorgeous, groovy mod apartment of a beautiful Argentinean dope queen. A public park tagged up with ETA graffiti hosts a gaggle of Bilbao punks all hanging out, including one of the dudes from ESKORBUTO.

El Pico is representative of the Cine Quinqui (“kinky”) genre of raw films about derelict Spanish street youth from the 70s and 80s.

8 - Never Mind The Baubles - Christmas '77 with The Sex Pistols [2013]

In 1977, SEX PISTOLS were a forbidden band, literally. “God Save the Queen” was banned by the BBC (making it the most censored record in British history), the band was forced to tour under a fake name to avoid cancellation, and its members were regularly targeted on the street and beaten up for being punk. In spite of the hardships, the Pistols set out on a “Never Mind the Bans” tour of Britain in December 1977. The last show of the tour was in Huddersfield, where they played a Christmas Day ball for the children of striking firemen and miners. The tour would turn out to be the PISTOLS’ final performances in the UK.

The shots of a blank-stared, spikey Sid Vicious banging out the bass in front of jumping, smiling children is priceless.

As with countless more of his endeavors, Malcolm McLaren was a fucking genius for putting this together.

7 - Intrépidos Punks [1988]

A gang of cave punks live up in the hills, only descending into town to rob, kill, and accost.

Purely aesthetic motorpunk eyecandy, much like…

6 - Crazy Thunder Road [1980]

Written and directed by Gakuryū Ishii, Crazy Thunder Road is the film school precursor to his widely acclaimed motorpunk epic Burst City. Like Burst City, Crazy Thunder Road is more of a frantic, chaotic opera of leather and chains than much of a compelling narrative, but there is more of a storyline than Intrépidos Punks.

The film centers around Jin, the leader of a biker gang who are, even by the standards of the other biker gangs featured, totally out of control. It takes the discipline of a right-wing paramilitary group to break the gang… but only briefly, until Jin declares war on the rival biker gangs and nationalist forces alike.

As in Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia, Ishii got real life bikers to act in the film’s roles.

“Every day, my assistant would go into town to find bikers to appear in the film. Usually, even if they had agreed, they wouldn’t show up on set because they had been arrested by the cops in the meantime.” —Gakuryū Ishii

The best scene is a long, unbroken shot of Jin, grumbling motor sounds with the distant, deranged stare of a madman in his eyes. The shot pans out to reveal both of Jin’s arms in casts, reducing him to self-simulate the thrill of the open road.

Crazy Thunder Road provides perfect action-packed, chaotic background reel for a party, bar, or show. Trying to follow the storyline, however, may leave you with the whiplash of a high-velocity motorcycle accident.

5 - Smithereens [1982]

One of the few early punk films out there with a female protagonist and a compelling plot.

Smithereens captures the fashion and general grittiness of early New York punk rock, with breathtaking scenes of urban decay on par with Sid & Nancy or Style Wars.

Wren, a runaway from New Jersey, hitches her star to a one-hit wonder rocker played by Richard Hell, who entices her to travel across the country to Los Angeles, where the promise of New York’s waning punk scene is supposed to be more rockfully fulfilled. Throughout the film, the characters narcissistically use each other in varying degrees of parasitic relationships, a dynamic of early New York punk that will be familiar to anyone who has read Please Kill Me.

The urban vanlife scenes fill me with aspirations for an American punk “wagenplatz” community, even though the vanlifer in Smithereens is just a solo maverick parked in the middle of a failed urban industrial desert.

4 - Dinner in America [2020]

Patty, an unrespected, unremarkable suburban loser dork escapes the oppressive ordinariness of home by burying her ears into headphones and masturbating while blasting the demo of PSYOPS, a local punk band shrouded in mystery.

One day, on a break from work, an on-the-lam punk uses Patty to evade police capture and convinces her to take him home for dinner, where he persuades Patty’s parents to let him stay a while… and her whole life falls into place.

I don’t want to give away too much because it was a true pleasure watching this film unfold. If you can get over the unneeded, gratuitous use of homophobic slurs, this movie rocks.

3 - How to Rob a Bank [2024]

“This is real. This is a robbery. Step away from your cages.”

The best documentary you’ll see for years. From 1992 to 1996, the Hollywood Bandit committed 19 known bank robberies in Seattle. He used the money to finance his off-the-grid Ewok village, fund Earth First! forest defense campaigns, and travel the world in an existential pursuit of his Self.

A confession: I actually re-watched this one determined to fit it into the top 10, convinced that there must have been some mention of the grunge scene that would qualify it as a punk-adjacent film. Sure enough, a bizarre interview has a square-as-fuck FBI agent describing Seattle’s nascent grunge scene, while one of the Hollywood Bandit’s friends explains the scene’s anti-establishment and anti-corporate ethos. However, what makes this movie punk isn’t the brief history of grunge; it’s the uncompromising individualism, the balls-to-the-wall adventure as a way of life, and its decadent anti-materialism.

With 2024’s upswing in armed attempts on those in power, I’d tell you to take inspiration from this film… but it’s just impossible not to.

WATCH. THIS. MOVIE.

2 - Verlierer [1987]

Not a happy story.

Two motor-rocker gangs, the Getto Sharks and the Rats, achieve a fragile truce over the urban industrial wasteland they cruise through. The younger brother of the Getto Sharks’ leader wants in, but the older brother doesn’t want to see him falling down the path of gang life. On a fateful night, after his drunken father kicks him out, the younger brother joins with a Rat who is being hunted by a xenophobic nazi psychobilly gang. The two strike up a heartening friendship, until the younger brother discovers his new compatriot’s membership in the rival Rats.

This movie is evenly weighed on both of the scales I have been rating this top 10 with: plot and aesthetic. While the Rats are solidly heavy metal rockers, the Getto Sharks have punks, skins, and biker-looking members, affording a sense of authenticity to the gang aspect of the film: it’s not about what scene you’re in exactly, it’s about how hard
you roll. The nazi psychobillies are as terrifying as they are fucking ridiculous to look at, and their appearance in the movie was one of those things that made me appreciate that there must have been a strong fad happening in the German 1980s underground rock scene that has not remained in the popular imagination or history of that scene. Like, usually the lazy go-to stereotype for a street nazi is a skinhead (as utilized in Good Vibrations), but here the skinheads are mixed in with the politically ambiguous Getto Sharks as just criminals, and the organized racists are psychobillies. Fuckin bizarre.

Verlierer was apparently made for German television in the 80s, and I could only find it with Spanish subtitles. If you don’t speak German or Spanish, you may need to put in some extra effort to produce an intelligible viewing experience… but it will be well worth it.

1 - The Legend of the Stardust Brothers [1985]

Spoilers: I cried. No shit.

I almost don’t even know what to say about this movie. I don’t actually want to give any of it away. I’ll say this: it’s a zany, low budget Japanese musical with touches of Rock’n’Roll High School, but narratively more elaborate. At its core, Legend of the Stardust Brothers is a story about sacrifice, love, and remaining true to yourself against the sisyphean machinations of the capitalist music industry. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

L-O-N-D-O-N BOOTS!

Honorable mention: Studio One Story [2003]

An oral history of the legendary ska, rocksteady, and reggae recording studio and label responsible for THE SKATALITES, DELROY WILSON, ALTON ELLIS, HORACE ANDY, THE HEPTONES, and many other Jamaican recording artists whose influence on early UK punk cannot be overestimated. The two-and-a-half hour running time betrays the amateur chops of the filmmaker, but as the interviewees are discussing events that took place nearly half-a-century ago, its understandable that he would want to pack in as much as possible. The result is a true document, in the fullest sense of the word “documentary.”

What makes Studio One Story so good is it’s no mess, no fuss editing. Each chapter opens with an interview about a different aspect of Jamaican music (sound systems, studios, toasters) and seamlessly weaves into a song that closes out the chapter with the iconic Soul Jazz Studio One frame. The rhythm of the film matches the rhythm of reggae: steady,
solid, and boss.

We’re always on the prowl for excellent underground punk movies. If you know of any, please drop us a line: podcast [at] crimethinc [dot] com