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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Bumfights: Cause for Concern

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09:44 / 27.05.04

Did anyone see this? It was really disturbing. Basically these four teenage filmmakers paid derelicts, crackheads, homeless drunks and prostitutesto kick and pound the living shit out of each other in exchange for more booze/crack and scraps of cash, filmed it all, and sold the finished product, with a bunch of high school scraps and 'found fights' thrown in for good measure. They eventually sold the rights for a cool 1.5 million dollars.

Copycat vids began appearing,(Bumhunts, Bumsluts etc.) and eventually, a group of inspired Australian yute in some sleepy Jerkwater town found the one homeless guy in the whole area, and burned him alive...and filmed it....to sell.
Another charming crew, the '311 Boyz' are currently up on attempted murder charges, after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, after gate crashing a party (on camers) and stoning some poor little teen bloke half to death. All on film, for entertainment.

The lawyers in these cases and sociolgists and psychiatrists used as talking heads all made the fair point that what's most disturbing about all of this is not so much that some freaky little fuckbakes would do it in the first place, but rather that they actually sold and made good profit from exploitation of the films...A hungry audience was willing to hand over cash to watch the desperate, dispossessed and disenfranchised hurting, injuring and causing suffering to one another...

In many ways, I guess it's kind of 'Jackass' to the nth degree, but it was pretty unsettling. Anyone see it?

10:17 / 27.05.04

No, but I've heard of martial artists being kidnapped and made to fight at gunpoint by bikers. Apparently the supporting event was "junkie fighting" as you just described. Sounds like the plot of a bad movie, but this site was selling the video- apparently the police show up at the end and arrest everyone. Damn, wish I could find the link, but this was years ago and I've been looking for it ever since without any luck.

12:32 / 27.05.04

what's most disturbing about all of this is not so much that some freaky little fuckbakes would do it in the first place, but rather that they actually sold and made good profit from exploitation of the films...A hungry audience was willing to hand over cash to watch the desperate, dispossessed and disenfranchised hurting, injuring and causing suffering to one another

And this is shocking? You know there's a huge industry based on exactly this; it's called Boxing.

12:50 / 27.05.04

The previous Bumfights thread.

I saw this documentary last night too.

Thoughts:

--The voiceover narration was a tad obnoxious at times, no? How many times did they mention the fact that these videos were "soundtracked by underground punk rock"?

--The complete lack of human empathy that the video clips showed (especially in the "Bum Hunt" section) scared the fuck out of me.

--The question of how this compares to Boxing etc was tackled in the previous Barbelith thread, if I remember correctly (I'm going to have to give it a proper re-read later). For me, the main difference between bumfights and pro sport/Jackass is the weird predatory vibe that these videos had, y'know?

I may post more later, if I can sort out my thoughts better (my brain = slush at the moment, sorry!).

*I understand that the fact that the violence in these videos was often set to music is important, as it basically constitutes part of the attempt to turn ugly violence into some sort of exciting aesthetic, but... there was a horrible sort of "see, these punk kids am having no values" subtext that I really wasn't up for.

13:33 / 27.05.04

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that Bumfights was no different from professional boxing; rather that an appetite to watch the desparate and disenfranchised fighting is both well established and lucrative.
And in my opinion, the documentary last night was a pretty shameless attempt to exploit this very fact...

'Look! Isn't this just a dreadful spectacle.... What kind of degenerate wants to see this kind of thing?.... Christ, you can see the bone snap in this one....' etc.

15:34 / 27.05.04

'Look ! Isn't this just a dreadful spectacle... "

Yeah exactly. On the one hand, it was a bit like watching Ski Sunday/Formula 1 - " My God, he's must have been falling for two hundred yards/his car's just exploded... So let's see that again ! " But on the other, it was much, much worse.

Then again, did anyone see something called " Hard Bastards/Britain's Hardest " or something like that on Sky One recently ? Presented by Phil Mitchell from Eastenders, this featured squaddies, fitness trainers, night club bouncers etc competing in tests of their physical and mental 'ardness, ( being held underwater till they virtually blacked out, that type of thing, ) before the two finalists wound up as close to bare knuckle fighting as the legal department could conceivably get away with in the ring of 'ardness, or whatever it was called. In the episode I saw, one of the contestants got slung out of this onto what looked very much like a bare concrete floor with some sacks scattered over it, and from the way he landed, looked pretty lucky not to have broken his neck. In other words, substitute tramps/junkies/drunks for pumped-up testosterone cases, and you're not a million miles away...

15:55 / 27.05.04

That documentary was really upsetting. The little fucker who started it all was really...cocky... about the whole thing. He showed no remorse whatsoever.
I was glad/sad to see that one of the homeless guys involved managed to get himself into rehab and seemed to be doing ok for himself. The other one was still on the street.
And what about that tattoo?! They actually convinced one of them to get their logo tattooed on his forehead. The tattooist testified in court that the man was sober when he was tattooed! He was pissed! Disgraceful.

The bit about the 311 Boyz made me want to kill them all in their sleep. A bunch of rich cunts beating people up to show how hard they were. (Never mind the fact that it took a bunch of them to beat up one guy. How tough are you if you need four of your mates to win a fight?)

On the other hand, the documentary was bordering very close on the kind of tabloid journalism that I despise. One the hand it was saying "Isn't this vile?" but on the other it was kind of like they were justifing showing these images because it was, like, a real, grown-up programme, y'know? It was saying that it was ok to watch what they did in their documentary but not ok to watch it for real. Weird dualism. (I don't think I explained myself very well there...)

At the end, there was a bit about how the original guy's latest "film" involves prostitutes and crack-addicts.

And the mentally-ill.

17:49 / 27.05.04

The very fact that it was on Five, a channel whose late night scheduling seems to be pretty much exclusively based around gaining entertainment from human misery, makes for much laughter.

20:33 / 27.05.04

Um, well, yeah. I was hoping we could ignore that...