HOOLIGANS & THUGS: FOOTBALLS MOST VIOLENT 2 OF 5

HOOLIGANS & THUGS: FOOTBALL'S MOST VIOLENT FAN FIGHTS PART 2 OF 5

You'd never know any of this watching the latest DVD release from Moonshine Entertainment entitled IHooligans and Thugs: Soccer's Most Violent Fan Fights. Like a literal collection of football fanatic's greatest hits, this disc offers a great deal of power, but very little prescience for the pound. After a very cursory glance at the backstory to this strange phenomenon, we are introduced to over an hour of frenzied, mostly home video and surveillance footage of hooligan hordes punching, boot stomping, and windmill side swiping each other.

We get highlights from all over the world and all manner of soccer matches, from the World Cup to neighborhood events. Divided up by small taped segments featuring Sex Pistol guitar hero Steve Jones (doing his best, demented Benny Hill, complete with complimentary cursing) this jumbled, non-linear look at soccer street fighting is as intriguing as it is irritating. This is not a documentary so much as a document, a collection of mismatched moments from some of the most disgusting displays of senseless hostility and aggression ever captured. The footage here is disturbing and disheartening, but not quite as potent as it could be.

First and foremost, the battles are mostly long shot, zoom lens pell-mell melees where indiscriminate objects that look like people bum rush each other for untold shaky camera scanning moments. Since we are at the mercy of bystanders or police, the frame moves wildly from place to place, hoping to capture action while leaving equally captivating material in the pan wake. We rarely see the outcomes of such gratuitous sadism. There are a few shots of the bloodied and stunned, but not enough to offset the distance from the maelstrom created by the onscreen presentation of the pandemonium.