Just when you thought American entertainment could sink no further, along comes "Bum Fights" by Indecline productions. Advertised on their Web site as the "world's fastest selling independent video," "Bum Fights" has found a low that even ancient Romans, who threw Christians to lions for popular entertainment, would find disturbing.
The premise is simple -- pay homeless men to get drunk and beat the crap out of each other, throw in some street brawls, some stunts by desperate homeless men and some arbitrary T & A and you've got the recipe for the lowest form of entertainment imaginable. The bulk of the video is comprised of your standard street fighting between middle-class citizens that, though low, isn't entirely contemptible. Most of the participants seem willing to fight and there was only one that could be construed as an ambush. What constitutes the next largest chunk of footage is socially reprehensible.
Right after the very hip MTV-style credits we immediately see some young men distracting an apparently homeless man they are conversing with, only to light his hair on fire. He doesn't notice for the first 5 seconds or so.
The next clip shows the young men urinating into a beer bottle and then serving said beer bottle to another man who happily devours it. They are laughing and the man appears to never catch on. Again the victim is a homeless man.
This degradation doesn't remain random for long. Soon after begins some systematic humiliation. They next introduce a character named "Rufus the Stunt Bum" who, for a small amount of money, repeatedly puts himself into harm's way for the camera.
Among other things, he head butts large storage units, gets "bowled" in a shopping cart into a trash bin, jumps off buildings into garbage receptacles, boogie-boards down a rocky, snow-covered hill, rolls down inclines made of gravel and throws himself down stairs.
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They return to this character throughout the hour-long film with new ideas for his torment. You can't help but stare, as this human being is reduced by his desperation to a mere plaything for some spoiled upper-class young men who have, somewhere along the way, entirely lost their humanity.
While Rufus isn't the only human being humiliated here, a list of their characters would be daunting. Some interesting themes cross between Rufus and the various crack-heads they harass, they "mark" them. At one point they take a man named "Donnie the vet" and pay him to get "bumfights" tattooed on his forehead.
This marking theme falls into another one of the show's characters: the "Bumhunter." Fashioned as a satire of the "Crocodile Hunter," made popular in the last few years, this "Bumhunter" performs the same function. Despite the victims' pleas and struggles, the "Bumhunter" wrestles, ties up, sometimes gags, "tags" the homeless victim and makes petty observations about their appearance and smell.
This, perhaps, is one of the most sick and deplorably dehumanizing acts I have ever witnessed. If this is the future of American entertainment, may G-d have mercy on us all.
