Broken (movie)
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The Broken Movie is a full length music video used by Nine Inch Nails to promote their Broken EP, released in 1992. It is a compilation video because each video in the package was recorded separately and then edited together, with the exception of "Gave Up". The video was filmed and directed by Peter Christopherson of the band Coil, and Trent Reznor.
The whole video is about twenty minutes in length and features videos for almost all of the tracks from Broken (The exception being the track "Last", which had no video). The wraparound story involves a young man being kidnapped and made to watch Nine Inch Nails videos while being tortured, which allegedly provoked an investigation by the FBI who thought that it was an actual snuff film.
The video for Happiness In Slavery was lifted from the compilation and used to promote the single of the same name. The video features performance artist Bob Flanagan strapping himself into a machine that subsequently rapes and kills him. The video was universally banned. The film also has a cameo by Robert Patrick (most famous for his role as the T1000 in the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day and brother of Filter frontman and former NIN guitarist Richard Patrick) portraying a police officer.
The video has not been given an official commercial release thus adding to its mythological status in alternative culture. The original hand-dubbed tapes were distributed by Reznor to various friends and dominatrixes with dropouts at certain points(the copies seen on p2p networks had no video for Help Me I am in Hell) so he could know who distributed any copies that might surface. A future release seems unlikely, although it was hinted by Reznor in the Access section of nin.com (http://www.nin.com) that it may appear on the Closure DVD. There are copies encoded in MPEG and AVI format that are distributed through p2p networks and Nine Inch Nails fansites. These are generally not of the highest quality as they are not first generation copies.