After years of anticipation – or honestly, after years of thinking that it was never going to happen due to one of the most notorious tangles of music rights in film history – Penelope Spheeris's iconic documentary trilogyis now on blu-ray and DVD thanks to the wonderful team at Shout! Factory. This is such a hotly-anticipated release – and such a massive amount of material – that one New to Blu review just won't do the job. So we're handling thecollection as separate reviews for each film, and a review of the box set itself, with its wealth of special features that are just as expansive as the movies. First, let's look back to 1981, when Spheeris unleashed the film that would define her career, and set the tone for all the punk rock documentaries that followed...is a film that has taken on a mythical status over time. It's a film that almost everyone has heard of, and knows by its fabled reputation, but that until this week, very few were actually able to see legally for many years. Out of print for over two decades,was one of the most famously sought-after and rare VHS and laserdisc releases among collectors, and was more commonly relegated to poor quality n-generation bootlegs. Perhaps best known from passed-along memories from its days as a video store staple in the 1980s, and from its much more readily-available soundtrack album, it is usually thought of as the ultimate punk rock movie... but now that everyone can see it again, does it live up to the hype?Well... yes and no. As someone who was lucky enough to actually own the Media Home Entertainment VHS of, I've always had a few reservations about the film that stop me from loving it as much as I'd really like to. The tricky thing about it is that it is actually two pretty different things at the same time. As a concert film documenting the early days of the L.A. punk scene, it is absolutely amazing: an intense, vivid, adrenaline-fueled epic that genuinely captures the experience of seeing bands like X, The Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and Fear at their furious beginnings, as well as The Germs during their all-too-short reign. But as a documentary about that scene and the people in it... it has some big problems. It's a very good film – in some ways a great film – but it is undeniably flawed, and has a bizarre, seemingly contradictory relationship with the very scene that it is about.