Brawlin Broads (XEG Home Video)
Starring the Boone brothers (and some broads)
About 15 years ago, I got called up for jury
duty. I never thought in a million years I’d get picked since I showed up
dead drunk, but I guess they saw that as a plus. I ended up sitting in on
a civil case between two teenage girls – one a hot blonde debutante, the
other an even hotter Puerto Rican chick- who got into a brawl in the
parking lot of some nightclub out in the suburbs. The blonde was suing the
chica for her dental bill, since she knocked out 4 of her teeth. They
ended up settling out of court, but it was a pretty fun ride anyway.
Until the third day, that is. That’s when they showed us the photographs
of blondie at the emergency room the night of the fight. This chick’s face
was just destroyed. It looked like somebody set off an M80 inside a pile
of raw meat. This taught me two important lessons: Don’t fuck with Puerto Rican chicks.
Don’t fuck with chicks at all, because they’re crazy.
Brawling Broads, thankfully, doesn’t go quite that far in it’s pursuit of voyeuristic thrills, but the premise is the same. Find two girls who aren’t all that smart, who happen to have some sort of beef with each other, pay ‘em $50 (or whatever) to sort their differences with slaps to the face and knees to the groin, and crank up the video camera to catch all the action. There are five girl fights on display, sandwiched between Jack Ass styled skits and plenty of crass born again redneck hijinxs courtesy the hosts, the Boone Brothers, and although the brawls themselves aren’t entirely realistic (that would just be alarming, as opposed to amusing and sorta boner-popping, like it is here), they are as realistic as the male psyche wants them to be, and who the fuck else would be watching a DVD called “Brawling Broads”, anyway?
There’s a lot of carrying-on in this DVD, that's for sure. While most girl-on-girl video battles are presented sans commentary, the Boone brothers have more face-time on this one than the chicks do. They sit on their couch in their wood-paneled basement (do they even have basements in California?), surrounded by kool-skool ephemera like Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto, a chrome skull, and a coffee table fulla Hustlers, sipping cheap beer out of the bottle and trading quips in a surly southern drawl. It’s somewhat disturbing to watch two guys who are obviously educated, super-hipster types talk like date-raping high school jocks from Alabama, but hey, it’s a catfight video, right? Let’s dumb it down. Let’s get real, real gone, baby.
Before each brawl, the Boone brothers rate the women on important categories like education (or lack thereof, for the most part), fighting experience (which usually amounts to high school locker room scuffles), and their career goals (either stripper or K-Mart manager, usually). They also provide all the necessary physical stats- height, weight, etc- but that’s hardly needed here, since all the girls are 18-20 year old skinny little hellcats with crazy eyes and no future. They look as though the Boone brothers may have purchased them all at the same white slavery auction at a group discount, or somethin’. After all that’s done with, the bros discuss how many beers it would take for them to fuck each opponent. Although this is the segment that provides the most smirks, I think they’re highly exaggerating on most of their ratings- 25 beers to bang the cute little coked up trailer park girl? Believe me, cats like the Boone's would fuck ‘em stone cold sober- with a raging hangover, even- and thank them for it. If these guys are ever sober, that is. All this pre-fighting jive is also accompanied by an impressive array of animated graphics, including exploding beer bottles and fire. All this crazed showmanship adds a strangely game show-like atmosphere to the proceedings, and if you watch this one with a buddy or two, there’s almost no way around it- you’ll be pausing to place your bets before each brawl.
And the chick-fights themselves? Well, I’ve seen a lot of catfight videos- I’m that kinda guy- and what separates Brawling Broads from the rest is that these chicks really are whaling on each other, albeit in a (somewhat) controlled environment. Some of ‘em cry and back out before the blood and bruises start swelling up, but for the most part, it’s authentic bitch slapping mayhem. There’s even a few solid punches to the face. And as the tongue-in-cheek intros illustrate, most of these girls would be out brawling in the streets anyway, so why not do it for a little extra beer money? What’s especially amusing about the fights- besides the arena itself, which is simply an open room with white sheets draped on all the walls, giving the action a Videodrome feel- is that you can hear other women shout words of encouragement (“Go on, Tina! Get ‘er!”) at the fighters, which probably means the girls were led to believe that this was some kind of sporting event, and not the freak show cock(less) fight that it is. I’m sure they were all thrilled with the finished product.
Listen, I know this kind of stuff is bound to raise the hackles of the easily offended, and the level of sheer, reckless misogyny is right off the charts, but so what? It’s still pretty funny. There’s some primitive stirring in the male reptile brain that gets whipped into a frenzy whenever two women start throwing punches at one another, and that’s never going to go away, so why not just embrace it for an hour or so of mindless fun? Besides, this is by far the mildest entry in XEG Home Video’s catalogue of casual depravity- these are the same fuckers that released the infamous “Bum Hunter” video, and there’s also a trailer included here for “Ghetto Brawls”, which appears to be a non-stop orgy of brutal black-on-black violence. At least Brawling Broads maintains a sense of detached rock and roll irony. Ain’t nothin’ rock and roll about a sweltering summer night in South Central.
-Sleazegrinder