Disc Reviews

"Everybody has a story to tell about their lives. My story begins the day I died."

It also seems that everybody has a tale of ancient fighters and heroes to tell. With the popularity of television shows like The Vikings and Game Of Thrones, there appears to be a considerable demand for this kind of film. Zack Snyder added his own graphic- novel style to 300, and it's been repeated to the point where the style itself has become a sub-genre of its own. The Spartacus series took that style, noted for the animated cartoonish blood in plentiful supply, and made it into a common event.

On October 9^th 1986 the network television landscape did something that hadn’t been done successfully in its 40-year history. A fourth network broke on the airwaves. It was called FOX and wasn’t even going to broadcast seven days a week. Most pundits in the television industry never gave it a chance. Most of the channels were in the double-digit UHF range. This had long been considered the independent station area, and a lot of televisions didn’t pick up this band as well as the established VHF band. And for a while it looked like the network was going to disappear almost as quickly as it appeared. But by 1987, the network suddenly had two big hits on its hands.

In 1999 I remember standing in line at the Tampa Theatre waiting to see The Blair Witch Project; the line wrapped around the corner.  All of us were anxious to see this film that was cloaked in so much mystery with an internet marketing campaign that manipulated so many to believe that the film we were all about to watch was in fact all true and was all found footage being released onto the big screen.  The Blair Witch Project wasn’t just a success, it was a smash hit, and it changed the way we view cinema, where we all saw that all you needed was a camcorder and a clever hook, and any regular Joe could create a hit film.

Steven Bochco is no stranger to innovative television. Hill Street Blues is arguably the best cop show ever made. Even his failures are praised for their innovativeness and freshness. Remember Cop Rock? NYPD Blue didn’t just push the prime time envelope. It tore the envelope to pieces and blew it away with hurricane-force winds. George Carlin made a career out of his “Seven words you can’t say on television”. Along comes NYPD Blue and Carlin just might have needed a new act.

The first thing I should discuss is the title. Brutalization is not the original title of this 1973 forgotten film. The DVD cover puts it very succinctly. “From the most forgotten vaults of European exploitation rises once again this effective and very violent Dutch thriller that boasts a young Sylvia Kristel that later on achieved world fame thanks to her role in the Emmanuelle series.” The intention of the re-release is to capitalize on the late Kristel's fame. The title Brutalization is probably more marketable and to the point than the original title, Because of the Cats.