I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman’s X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu performing a live score. It sounded too good to be true but how would it work?  Would the audio be turned off so that the movie would essentially be treated as a silent film with a new score? Would the band perform a spontaneous live remix of Les Baxter’s score while riding the volume levels? Would the film’s dialogue be heard at all in this presentation? All of my questions were answered on Tuesday, March 25^th, 2008 at Atlanta’s Plaza Theater when I attended the Pere Ubu show.

*This is an archival reprint of an article that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies (the blog was discontinued in the Fall of 2018 and is no longer available).