The Trailer Trash Rates The Rentals

Once again the holidays are upon us, and once again, for most of us, that means the giving of gifts. As self-proclaimed cinematic gurus, The Trailer Trash staff enjoy waltzing down the aisles of our respective video stores, analyzing the latest releases available for purchase as the sorts of last-minute gifts for those special people whose interests you know and/or care absolutely nothing about. Gifts that say "Hey, you there — here's a gift that I put absolutely no thought into at all. Hope you like Tomb Raiding. Two."

Yes, every year seems to bring with it that one blandly inoffensive movie that's the perfect gift for distant relatives and estranged siblings — this year's cop-out gift seems to be Pirates of the Caribbean. At last count, over 11 billion copies of this pirate adventure had been sold in America alone. We hope you're as excited as we are to give — and receive! — entire pallet-loads of this film over the coming week. We've even got plans to make a cool fort out of them.

While perusing the New Releases aisle at Blockbuster, another title caught our eye that was deemed immediately worthy of review under our Rates the Rentals feature. Though it's not technically even a movie, we hope you'll agree that it makes the perfect gift for that special someone under ten years old.

Winner, Best Children's Gift (Child-Killing Division)
Backyard Wrestling:

One of the nasty side effects of having friends is that if not monitored closely, they will eventually marry someone and breed. If you're not careful, this means getting roped into babysitting their spawn — spawn they made either accidentally or on purpose, the act of doing so having blinded them into seeing a gently glowing miracle of nature where everyone else sees a fat, drooling poop machine.

If you ever find yourself in this position, I find the best way to extricate yourself is through the immediate purchase of The Very Unsuitable Gift. Throwing stars, an economy-sized bottle of bleach, Kidnapper-in-a-Box™ — it doesn't matter what it is, so long as it has a bow on it and will convince your friends what a bad guardian you'd be for their child. You'll thus be left free from the duties of minding children you didn't conceive, and your friends will be forced into being "those parents" — the ones who bring their kids everywhere with them to the annoyance of everyone else.

"Excuse me, miss. That thing you're holding? The one that's emitting a continuous wail at the highest threshold of human hearing, blotting out all dialogue from the film? Is that some kind of ultra-sonic device?"

"It's actually a baby. We couldn't get a sitter."

This year's Very Unsuitable Gift comes in the form of a video game I spotted at my video store today called Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home — presumably only named so because the title Buying This Makes You a Ridiculously Unfit Parent was already taken by the manufacturers of a knife-juggling kit for toddlers.

Games like this always get me curious as to how the people involved in its creation possibly justified it to themselves, since it so clearly exists for the sole purpose of encouraging children to violently maim and kill themselves. In and of itself a noble goal to be sure, though perhaps not the best marketing strategy if you’re a company interested in making a profit and not, say, getting sued for all you’re worth.

To take a different example: a game like the Quake series would pose some problems for impressionable kids, in that they'd have to actually fly to another planet and shoot rail-guns at shrieking hell-borne demons if they wanted to emulate the game. I'm sure worried parents could make the argument that the violence in general of the Quake games might have been a contributing factor in little Billy clocking his brother in the skull with a frying pan; but I'd counter with the defense that if the best Billy could come up with in mimicking a space marine shooting hover-skulls with a fully automatic rifle was to hit his brother in the forehead with a frying pan, clearly the only victims here were Billy's invention and creativity.

Not so with Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home, which requires no creativity at all on the part of a child to emulate all the cool violent stuff they're seeing, were they so inclined. Certainly there's a level of difficulty in climbing to the top rung of a ladder with the intent to jump off it and land on one's spine — but it would be hard to argue that it's nearly as tricky as teleporting into a hellish nightmare realm in a different galaxy, armed only with a large variety of portable cannons.

Either way, this game is so monumentally unsafe that just looking at it conjures up the image of a pile of twitching young corpses. With the lone exception of Garbage-Bag-Over-Your-Head Super-Cool Freedom Force, I can't even imagine another game capable of generating such a high body count.

I hope I don't have to point out how hilarious just the name is. Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home. Think about that for a second. Clearly its makers didn't — unless the title possesses a level of irony I'm not willing to concede Eidos Games was intelligent enough to give it.

As a phenomenon, backyard wrestling sprung up because impressionable kids watched pro wrestling on TV and then tried it at home: hence the name backyard wrestling, dubbed so because kids wrestled in their backyards. Of their homes. As a warning, Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home seems about as effective a deterrent as Delicious All-Beef Patties: Don't Cook These On a Grill or New & Improved Gloves: Don't Put These On Your Hands.

In fact, if you were so inclined to backyard wrestle (and if you are, this alone should be some indication of nature's invisible hand culling you from the herd), I'm at a complete loss as to where you'd be able to try it other than someone's home, without breaking at least one of the two tenets implied by the name of the exercise.

At any rate. It's a hollow, hollow warning, slapped on a box by manufacturers who, beyond a desire to not get sued, haven't really put any thought into the welfare of your child. The only saving grace here is that the product is a video game, so luckily its glorification of backyard violence gets cancelled out by its ability to make kids sit on their asses all day getting so fat that any ladders they might climb to practice backyard wrestling would invariably crumple under their weight. It's a pretty small victory when the best we can do is ensure children are only virtually committing stupid, maiming acts; but I guess you take victories where you can.

(In the interests of fairness, I should point out that the Entertainment Software Rating Board has taken due precautions. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home gets a Mature rating, "for Strong language." Whew! Thank God the ESRB stepped in on that one. I know when I'm buying my kids video games that illustrate how easy it is to pile drive a friend off the roof of our house, I like to be warned if the game characters have potty mouths while they're doing it.)