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Fox Home Entertainment presents

Cops: Bad Girls (1989)

"All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law."- opening voiceover

Stars: Bad girls, the men and women of law enforcement
Director: various

MPAA Rating: Not Rated for (language, themes)
Run Time: 00h:48m:54s
Release Date: 2004-03-23
Genre: television

Style
Grade
Substance
Grade
Image Transfer
Grade
Audio Transfer
Grade
Extras
Grade
B- C+B-B- C+

 

DVD Review

One of the more entertaining (and certainly one of the original) entries in the perversely voyeuristic world of reality programming has been the long-standing Fox television series, Cops. The premise is simple: put a camera in a patrol car and follow the varied adventures of everyday law enforcement as they come in contact with all manner of drugs, accidents, murder, domestic abuse, and just about anything else you can imagine. No matter what city a given episode is set in, the end result is always the same, usually involving a shirtless man under the influence of something or other, skanky prostitutes, and maybe a pursuit or two.

Fox has recently started parceling out themed discs from the series, such as this entry, luridly entitled Cops: Bad Girls. It may be implied that these are unexpurgated clips from Cops, when in reality this is nothing more than a collection of clips (complete with the same bleeped out obscenities and blurred nudity you get for free on television). Now that's not a bad thing necessarily, because the entertainment value, such as it is, is still there, though I think the marketability could have been greatly enhanced if there were more raw, unedited moments. Plus, the runtime of the main segment of this disc is well under an hour, and for a show that has been on as long it has, it certainly seems like this could have easily been at least two hours long.

In this collection (most of which feature women), the clips are culled from all over the country, including Ft. Worth, Nashville, Des Moines, Albuquerque, Virginia Beach, Mesa, and Tacoma, and though the locations change it could have just as well been the same locale over and over. The sameness of our country's weirdo populace is one of the show's recurring in jokes, and whether its an indecent exposure, theft, or drugs, the streets all start looking the same after a while. When these particular segments were filmed or aired is never mentioned, nor is it particularly relevant for that matter.

Every oyster has a pearl, and in Cops: Bad Girls the producers wisely save it for the last segment—kind of like a rock band saving their best song for the encore—in which Arizona cops respond to a disturbing the peace call. They find a wildly inebriated young woman named Catherine (that's her on the DVD cover, eating a face full of car hood) whose almost incoherent babblings are brilliant bits of unintentional comedy. Her response to the question "Do you have any I.D?" is "I.D.? Yeah, I'm a stripper!", and things progress downwards from there, as she pleads for her license (which she refers to as her "passport to get into New Mexico") and finally begins uttering bizarre phrases ("Twin Peaks! Twin Peaks!") before banging her head on the wall and shouting repeatedly that she is white.

I know it's wrong to like this, and its just a slapped together clip show disc, but there is a undeniably prurient entertainment value here.

Rating for Style: B-
Rating for Substance: C+

 

Image Transfer

 One
Aspect Ratio1.33:1 - Full Frame
Original Aspect Ratioyes
Anamorphicno


Image Transfer Review: The shaky hand-held video format of the show is reproduced here in its original 1.33:1 fullframe aspect ratio. Quality is nothing special, certainly no better or worse looking than it does on television. Image detail fluctuates a bit, especially during night sequences, but the presentation is more than adequate.

No noticeable dirt or defects were evident.

Image Transfer Grade: B-
 

Audio Transfer

 LanguageRemote Access
DS 2.0Englishno


Audio Transfer Review: Audio is provided in a simple 2.0 Dolby stereo mix that manages to capture all of the various ramblings cleanly and clearly.

Nothing fancy, but presentable.

Audio Transfer Grade: B- 

Disc Extras

Static menu with music
Scene Access with 6 cues and remote access
Subtitles/Captions in English with remote access
1 Documentaries
Packaging: Amaray
Picture Disc
1 Disc
1-Sided disc(s)
Layers: single

Extras Review: For some reason, these compilation discs relegate the so-called Too Hot For TV stuff to the extras department, when it seems that making an entire DVD full of unedited material would have made more marketing sense. In this segment, which runs 17m:20s, we get to see from skanky biker chicks flashing their flabby boobs and walking around with their butt cheeks showing for a few minutes (that's about it for the bad girls), with the bulk of the material here confined to mean-tempered men spouting obscenities at their arresting officers.

The disc is cut into 6 chapters, and includes optional English subtitles, which you will want to use for Catherine the stripper's hilarious rantings.

Extras Grade: C+
 

Final Comments

This is just a compilation of women in trouble from Cops, in the same edited-for-television format, so in that regard it offers nothing really new, or particularly unique.

Still, this is worth a rental just for Catherine the drunken stripper.

Rich Rosell 2004-03-22