Three laughs: Parole Violators

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.  

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file #27:
Parole Violators, USA 1994
Director: Patrick G. Donahue

You might know that I tend to love action movies more when the cars in chases are rusted-up old lemons and the actors seem to be picked from a local gym or bus stop. And as dumb as they come. In this case Parole Violators is a home run for me.

"We're ALL potential Video Cops!"

The film concerns a vigilante going around with a video camera to beat some sense to store robbers and the likes. But he also seems to know their names and criminal histories. In actuality, it is the mulleted ex-cop Miles Long (Phil Donahue) who also hosts a local TV crime show.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Cops, an irredeemable piece of propaganda that for years colored the public eye for police brutality and treatment of the poorer classes. Fictional world at least gives us a canvas through which we can better handle the ideas being fed to us. In this case, of course, they are being given as dumb and ineptly as possible which makes the movie such a laugh riot. This film is not really even a narrative per se, more a showcase of various stunts like getting hit by a car or falling from any height. The final showdown in particular is a shooting range that constantly keeps upping the ante with more and more inventive kills.

Anyway, Miles himself soon gets to see that there are cases he can't solve with his camera as a guy he helped put away comes after him and his family. He and his girlfriend must survive a gauntlet after they are kidnapped by a small army of thugs.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The first laugh comes from the opening scene that shows the masked Video Cop stop a convinience store robbery. It shows everything you need to know about the movie, with a lot of roundhouse kicks thrown, cardboardy sets destroyed and wilhelmy cartoon screams added on the soundtrack. My favorite move is Video Cop hitting the robber on the head with his own camera. I gotta wonder how that footage will look on Miles's show.

2. One of my favorite scenes is a woman-on-woman fist fight that ends with the bad girl's head getting impaled to a nail sticking out of a wall. The female lead (Pamela Bosley) quips "Hope you got you tetanus shot, bitch."

3. It gets increasingly crazy on just what the main characters are able to survive as the movie goes on. A particularly insane climatic scene sees Miles getting shot twice while on a roof, but as he's sliding down, he chances the clip on his handgun and shoots baddies as he falls down, landing on his back on a crappy car. It's an image of the entire movie, none of the Lethal Weapons ever did anything so excoiting.