Saturday, January 14, 2006

The Natives Were Restless

I was wandering around the Fopp book store in Cardiff looking for what to read once I had finished the novel I am currently reading and decided to browse through the DVD section to see if there was anything worth looking at.

I had no intention to buy as I was merely passing the time before I had to catch the bus home but an item caught my eye. It was something that over the past few years I had wanted. It was the DVD of one of my favourite films as a child.

In the mid 1980's I was sitting in the living room watching the television and a trailer for a new movie about a pair of highway robbers came on. These two individuals weren't your usual highway robbers with covered faces riding on horses. They wore a clown and wolf-man mask respectively and rode a Suzuki motorcycle instead of a horse.

A few weeks later my father took me and my sister on a day trip to Bristol and while we were there he asked us what we wanted to do. As a film buff back then I asked whether we could see what film was on in the cinema so we went up to the billboard to see and there it was. Restless Natives.

We were too early to see the film as it was for an evening screening so it wasn't until a few years later that I got to see it when it was on Channel Four on a Thursday night.

It is set in Scotland and is about two young men who have no direction in life. One is a failed park sweeper whilst his friend works at a joke shop. I still do not know whether it is based in Edinburgh or Glasgow (something that I should be ashamed of as I have sen this film so many times). The two then embark on a robbery spree hijacking tourist coaches that are on excursions across the Scottish highlands. Eventually, they become cult heroes and become like Rob Roy stealing form the rich and handing out the money to the poor people of the estates where they were brought up.

And so it was here in the bookshop that I finally found a copy. Over the last few years I saw the deleted VHS title on ebay going for ridiculous amounts of money (£60 upwards) and I also managed to find copied DVD's of it which were going for an acceptable price but it was, after all, a copy and fake.

It is great that the film can now be viewed by a newer audience. It is dated due to the vehicles and clothes but is still a great story nonetheless.

I have an original copy now and after 22 years it's about time.

No comments:

Post a Comment