The virtues of Comcast’s free movies on demand service has finally begun to outweigh their faults when it comes to their horrid customer service. There are so many gems buried in the repository, that without the service, we here at the camp may never have become privy to. For example, take this golden oldie that the sweet gravity-boob screencap above is from. Below the Belt follows the struggles of a female wrestler from New York as she fights her way all the way to the top of the circuit, in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not quite sure what the title actually has to do with female wrestling per se, but there are quite a number of amazing sequences in this film, and the one unifying piece that (sleeper)holds this drama together...THE MONTAGES.
There are honest-to-god no less than TEN montages featured in the movie, beginning almost immediately and continuing every few minutes or so, right to the end. The montages do more to drive the story than the dialogue does, which is pretty telling. Entire characters and subplots are awkwardly dropped in between montages (“I need to get warm”). I almost think the movie could have been stripped down into one epic wrestling music video, and I would be okay with that.
The little info available on Below the Belt reveals it was filmed in 1974, but unreleased until 1980 (and reviewed in 1983 by The New York Times), probably to cash in on the rags-to-scabs Rocky bandwagon. It doesn’t seem to be available on DVD or youtube, but if you have Impact VOD through your cable provider, which is maybe only available from Comcast, you can find it now! For free!
Or you can pay buttloads for a VHS on amazon.
Posts
