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