Heroin Screws You Up: Paging James Lipton

Description: I was tempted to call this "Heroin Screws Your Acting Ability Up" but he was none too clever before the smack. At one point he seems to forget what it is he's hooked on. Shame, as otherwise this PIF has something going for it (bathetic echo effects notwithstanding); coming along in 1986, this second wave of "Heroin Screws You Up" PIFs eschew Sammy Harari's abstract representationalism in favour of attempting to depict people who live in what might pass for the real world, getting into heroin, which inevitably screws them, as the phrase has it, up. To be honest, this one needed to be grittier. Hire people who can act, shoot in a cinema-verité style. Instead of having him look dishevelled and tired, but still oddly alluring, in the closing shot, have him crawling on his hands and knees in search of whatever droplets of liquid H he might be able to wring out of individual carpet fibres, bug-eyed and covered in needle scars, wearing just a soiled pair of underpants. That would have been realistic and unnatractive. In fact, forget the fiction altogether, just follow a genuine half-dead junkie for a week or so and splice together the most horrifyingly dispiriting bits. Maybe just use Layne Stayley's home videos. Extracted from an upload of a Channel 4 ad break from 1986.