Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

It's safe to say Hollywood will never again make a movie like Cruising, the infamous 1980 William Friedkin thriller that kicked off a storm of controversy and nearly killed off the career of Al Pacino, who plays a New York cop posing as a leather bar regular to catch a vicious serial killer. Seen today it's a bizarre, fascinating, incredibly skewed depiction of a subculture soon to be threatened with extinction, and the pulsating soundtrack is an equally compelling mixture of early punk, funk, and flat-out weirdness. Included here is the full original song soundtrack (including the immortal "Lump"), plus additional tracks by the Germs recorded for the film but not used in the final cut and a suite of Jack Nitzsche's nerve-jangling score. For extra fun, a few choice dialogue samples (some of them a little raunchy, so be warned) have been added to recapture the distinctive, er, flavor of the film. Friedkin's original cut of this often-mangled curio supposedly runs nearly three hours and now languishes somewhere in the Warner vaults; somebody save it, please!