Knock-Out Hockey and
Incredible Hockey Fights & Brawls

The voice is excited beyond description, breathlessly spitting out its monologue with the rhythm of a machine gun: "They're giving it to him! Oh yeah! This is toe-to-toe! Omygod! My God! My God!"

On screen, a man wearing ice skates is thrusting his crotch upward, repeatedly smacking a kneeling man square in the face. In the background, music is aggresively throbbing along: it's Tony MacAlpine, playing popular screaming-guitar favorites from "Violent Machine," his latest CD of garage metal.

Welcome to hell. Knock-Out Hockey and Incredible Hockey Fights & Brawls are the ninth circle, my young pop-culture Dantes. Welcome to the three headed Beast, chewing in its multiple maws the virtues of Reason, Good Taste and Non-Shitty Music.

In theory, a tape filled with nothing but hockey fights seems like a pretty good idea. If not for fights, why watch hockey? For the skating? For a small vulcanized piece of rubber zipping across an ice rink? No, that's clearly beside the point. Broadway productions of "Les Miserables" aside, Americans are still a culture of barely-evolved ape-people — the later-day successors to the robust, bloodthirsty Romans who were so feared and disdained by the civilized Greeks. As such, we want blood, and we want it now.

Let's be honest: The so-called "game" of hockey is really nothing more than a sort of orchestrated pause, installed as a spacer between the really delicious bits of the sport: the times when young, testosterone-crazed men go after each other to prove who's king of the ice. This is not a point lost on the producer of these tapes, the appropriately named MAL Video, Inc.

Knock-Out Hockey asks, "Tired of all the shooting and scoring between fights?"

And before watching the tapes, this reviewer would have been squarely in the large, sweaty camp of Americans bellowing "Hell yes!"

But after 90 minutes of non-stop ice-borne bitchsmacking it's a wonder that I'm still able to think clearly, let alone type.

The problem is not so much that hockey fights are boring. The fights themselves have moments of real drama, particularly when players get up into the stands and actually start beating on fans. The problem is that you're watching 90 straight, unrelenting minutes of fighting (45 per tape), accompanied sporadically by grunting that could only generously be called "commentary."

When the voiceover bellows "Many times, a smaller and lighter player will really put it to a larger opponent!" it doesn't really enhance the experience. Add the incessant drone of garage metal bands including Unfortunate Lazarus and Mr. Destructive, and an evening's kitschy good cheer is morphed into a frozen nightmare world of aggression and rhythmless lead guitarists.

There is, it should be noted, a real quality difference between the two tapes. As my roommate was perceptive enough to note, "Knock-Out Hockey is clearly the superior product." Okay, fair enough — Knock-Out Hockey has faster fights, more creatively-done terrible music, and an intensity that the even-more cobbled-together Fights & Brawls somehow lacks.

If watching a crowd howl like baboons while beating on plexiglass barriers to the tune of countrified garage metal is your idea of a good time, Knock-Out Hockey may be worth checking out. Otherwise, stay away — even if they promise you a free hockey puck for ordering the videos.

It's a trick.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)