I Can’t Understand Why “Parole Violators” Had Such A Limited Distribution

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie Parole Violators, but I can’t see why that movie didn’t have a wider distribution. A writer friend of mine named Joe Simmons loaned this movie to me, though the only place he ever found it was in a gas station DVD bargain bin off some highway in South Dakota. Surely this deserved a little better marketing than that.

I mean, setting aside for a moment the poorly delivered and utterly pointless dialogue, the horribly choreographed fight scenes where hits frequently and obviously do not connect with the targets, and the utterly generic characters and plot…well, there wouldn’t be any movie left at all. Still.

I do note that people often say that 80-90s cop action films all followed a formula and how easy it would be for them to make one. However, most people then actually made a movie using the formula. The Parole Violators people didn’t. Instead, they apparently went ahead and just filmed the formula itself.

How can you beat that? How could that go direct to extremely, extremely limited DVD release?

Imagine a female fight scene that ends with a person backing up to accidentlly impale the back of her skull on a protruding nail. Imagine that this is somehow sufficient to enable her body to hang in the air from the nail. Now imagine the victor of the fight saying: “Hope you had your tetanus, b*#&!”

Now, Parole Violators wasn’t the worst movie I’ve seen…but dear lord it wasn’t good.