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xmag.com
: September 2002: The Jack Shack |
The
porn vid highlighted this month has a few glimpses
of hot model
Angela Taylor prancing around in thong and top,
but other than that there is no sex except one
five-second shot of a bum getting a blow job off
another bum. Bumfights: Cause for Concern
is not a porn vid in the strictest sense, but
this adventure in the sewer deserves a review
in The Jack Shack.
Shot
mostly with a hand-held camera by a director overly
enamored with a fisheye lens, Bumfights is
filled with violence, sick pranks, catfights,
paranoid crackheads, and raw gore. The vid has
captured the imagination of perverted minds from
coast to coast. It's been trashed on CNN and many
other news outlets for plumbing the depths of
bad taste. The bad publicity has been wonderful
for the producers of Bumfights, Ray Latina
and Ty Beeson, both twenty-year-old graduates
of film schools. It has sold over 200,000 copies
to date. Most porn vids top out at about 5,000
copies.
The
title is somewhat misleading. Although there are
a few bum
fights, for the most part the fights are among
young guys, mostly white, in and around Las Vegas.
This is not a documentary. None of the fighters
are interviewed. There's no voiceover narration
indicating where the fights take place, who is
doing the fighting, why they are kicking the shit
out of each other, or what the fuck is really
going down. Yet that is what makes the vid appealing.
Fifty-six minutes of random, meaningless violence.
Many
of the fights are organized bouts, or rather,
organized along the lines of raves years ago,
when word of mouth spread the news of an underground
happening.
Young
guys dressed in jeans and T-shirts punch, kick,
and grapple with each other in a parking lot surrounded
by throngs of people. The people in the crowds
and the fighters don't look that tough. They look
like mall rats. But the fights are brutal. It's
mass delinquency and organized mayhem on a grand
scale. Bare-knuckled boxers swing wildly at each
other, occasionally landing a bloody punch. One
guy jumps on another and pounds his head in the
pavement...a husky kid with a crewcut lands a
sucker punch to the jaw of a jerk taunting him...a
little guy throws a headlock on his opponent and
repeatedly smashes him on the back of his neck.
The
flow of the vid is sheer chaos. There is no beginning,
middle or end. It opens with two bums in a public
restroom hurling garbage cans at each other. Some
continuity is provided through Rufus the "Stunt
Bum," a scraggly, bearded wino befriended by the
film makers, who take him to a tattoo parlor and
engrave the words "bum fight" on his fists. Rufus's
specialty
is ramming his head into stacks of crates and
walls, which he does repeatedly, one time rushing
headlong into a fast-food drive-through sign.
He tumbles down an embankment in a shopping
cart, chugs a forty-ouncer, and collapses on
the pavement, only to be revived and driven
down the Las Vegas strip in an open car hurling
epithets at passersby heading to the casinos.
T-Bone
the crack dealer asks us not to patronize Mexicans.
"Bring yo money to a black man, my shit is fat,
I serve rocks all day." Another bug-eyed crack
dealer, Bling Bling, rambles on about getting
captured by extraterrestrials and shows how
he hides his crack pipe under the collar of
his smelly shirt. A big black guy jerks his
front tooth out with a pair
of pliers.
The
funniest part of the vid is a parody of the
Aussie crocodile hunter on Animal Planet.
"The Bum Hunter," dressed like the Croc Hunter,
creeps up on vagrants in the middle of the night,
pounces on them, ties them up with duct tape,
and marks his "specimens" with a Magic Marker.
Todd Richard Lewis has it down in his role as
the Bum Hunter. After tying up one of his struggling
specimens he assures him, "I'm not gonna hurt
ya, mate, just relax now, calm down. Ohhh, we
got a wild one here, just want to do some routine
checks on ya. A young buck. Don't find many
of these in the wilds."
He
takes out a tape and measures his prey's shoulder
blades and marks him on the forehead #142. The
bum who is awakened under his blanket can't
figure out what is going on. He's not frightened,
just startled and confused. The producers of
the vid say none of this was staged. Maybe,
maybe not, but the bum sort of falls into the
swing of things. At first he protests: "What
ya want? I'm not doing nothing." The bum hunter
shines his flashlight on the guy's head. "Looks
like we got a lot of dandruff here." The specimen
replies: "I ain't got no dandruff."
One
bum gets a broken ankle in a fight, but that's
a small hurt in the life of bums. People can
whine all they want about the dehumanization
and violence for violence's sake in Bumfights,
but this journey into the wretched landfill
of wasted-out existence is fine tonic for the
voyeur.
For
more info on ordering the vid and all the other
crap in the Bumfight catalog, check out bumfights.com.
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