Angel Mine Fever

Rip It Up, Issue 16, 1 October 1978, Page 18

Angel Mine Fever

Angel Mine - A New Zealand feature film with a musical soundtrack will premiere with a concert by the Suburban Reptiles and the Plague at Auckland's Winter Garden Theatre on October 19. The film takes its. title from a commercial wonder drug for people with marital problems, a product of scriptwriter-director David Blyth’s imagination with heavy implications for all the Lockwood housebound couple? in Pakuranga. Both bands playing at the premiere are involved with the film. Richard von Sturmer, of the Plague, contributed to the scriptwriting, and two Suburban Reptiles’ songs, "Saturday Night Stay at Home” and the previously unreleased "Razorblade Rosie", are on the soundtrack. Angel Mine carries little dialogue "because New Zealanders don't speak that much," David Blyth says. Communication rests mainly with familiar commercial voice-overs in Angel Mine the TV is always turned on and expressionists use of music linked to the visual images; The Reptiles for the suburban couple's sinister "shadows" in their fantasy sequences, funk bands Charisma and Urban Road for the soft sell fantasies the couple absorb from the übiquitous TV commercials, "African gumbopt music" for the sex scenes, with a score written by Mark Nicholas, an Auckland Music Conservatorium graduate, and played by the Auckland Youth Orchestra.