Product Description

Goes "behind the scenes" of the Jerry Farrelly show (a thinly veiled version of the Jerry Springer Show) to dramatize a trailer-park love triangle whose members end up on national TV. System Requirements:Directed by Neil Abramson Writing credits Jon Bernstein Starring Jerry Springer Jaime Pressly Molly Hagan Michael Jai White Runtime: 90 minFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: R UPC: 012236073604

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43989 in DVD
• Brand: Lions Gate
• Released on: 1999-03-30
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 5.00 pounds
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.com
Shock-talk TV host Jerry Springer makes his feature-film debut in Ringmaster and is, unfortunately, the least interesting aspect of this ragtag comedy that purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at the kind of people who regularly appear on his show. To be fair, Springer doesn't have much to do except play the often-befuddled moderator. The only time he breaks loose is to defend his guests' right to air their dirty laundry on national television. But most of the juicy lines and situations are assigned to the competent cast of trailer-park denizens who pop in and out of each other's beds and then go on TV to tell everyone about it. There's a hair-pulling scene about every 10 minutes or so. But unlike the nationally televised syndicated program, there is also a great deal of real nudity and unbleeped profanity. There aren't many surprises here, but the actors are amiable and attractive and don't play down to their characters. For all its raunchiness, Ringmaster doesn't have a mean bone in its body. The DVD is formatted in widescreen. Additional features include the film's trailer, a music video, production information, and a commentary from the director, Neil Abramson. --Richard Natale

Customer Reviews

Depressed? Watch This!
This weekend I was depressed. I felt I didn't make enough money, am stuck in a dead-end computer job, up to my neck in debt, am fat and ugly (I'm a 38 Asian-Latino male with braces!), and had serious doubts about my current relationship until I watched this movie. This movie made me laugh at my self-doubts, with a truly ridiculous zing. This movie proves no matter how bad things can get, there are a lot of other Americans out there with lives much worse than mine. I'm a big fan of Jerry Springer. I think he shows the side of America most of us want to sweep under the rug. As his interview on Good Morning America pointed out, it's acceptable when Arnold or Bruce show violence. Or, it's acceptable when our elected governmental officials sleep around, embezzle, or yell at one another during law making sessions. No one tells the story of these people, except him.

Talk about guilty pleasures...
Let me state here and now: I loathe the "Jerry Springer" TV show. I think it's contemptible the way he exploits the vulnerabilities of low-income people desperate for their fifteen minutes of fame, encourages them to bare all their sordid secrets on nationwide TV, and then claims he's doing it all for a greater good. So I expected to loathe this movie when I caught it on late night TV recently, and instead ended up on the floor laughing myself halfway into a coma. So why would I like this film, trashy as it is, and hate the show?

One reason is Springer's ability to spoof himself; he has the grace not to take himself too seriously; he knows exactly what a schlockmeister he is, and he plays himself to the hilt in this movie. Another is that while on the TV we only see the people doing their bad thing on stage (and the audience egging them on with howls of "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!"), in the film we see the hacks and flacks who help to prey on these people and get them to make themselves look their very worst in front of a national audience. And thirdly, the characters in the film are so over-the-top, so grotesquely stereotyped, we can safely laugh at them because they look so unreal.

Here are Angel and Starletta, trailer trash and ghetto trash, winning the chance of a life time to appear on TV as the subjects of segments of "My traitor friends" and "You did WHAT with your stepdaddy?!" Angel is a 17 year old motel maid with a mother only 15 years her senior, sharing a trailer with mom's hubby, with whom Angel is having an affair, right under mom's nose. And don't think mom doesn't know what her skanky offspring is up to; when mom crashes the party and catches the two of them in the act, she goes right off and turns the tables with Angel's sort-of-fiance. Meanwhile, Starletta has caught her supposed best friend in bed with her no-good philandering boytoy Demond, amid a great deal of hair-pulling and name-calling.

Angel, Starletta, and their entourages are all called to LA to appear on Jerry's show, but Angel's stepdad gets cold feet at the last minute, realizing some things are too private to be discussed on TV, and walks out. Not to worry; there's plenty of adventure on the side between Angel and the philandering Demond, who somehow gets inveighled into getting it on with Angel's mom as well. Turns out that there is action galore for the show even without the stepdad. When Starletta's two-timing girlfriends announce from the audience they caught Angel with Demond, Starletta rushes the stage (amid the usual howls of "Jerry") and goes for Angel literally tooth and nail; and when Angel's clueless boyfriend, who looks like the only word he is capable of is "Duh", turns out to have been awake at the switch after all and announces to nationwide TV that Angel is carrying her stepdaddy's baby (Mom didn't know THAT tidbit), all hell breaks loose. The show segments of the film look a lot like what's shown on TV, with the notable exception that the bleeped-out words are very much unbleeped (if profanity disturbs you, get some earplugs to watch this movie with), and the nudity isn't pixeled into abstraction.

This is a film to watch if you're in the mood for some mindless diversion, which everybody needs from time to time. Just be warned that to watch this movie in VHS, you will have to scroll through 18 minutes of commercials to get to the start of the film. Get the DVD.

Holy Hell!!!
I just can't understand Jerry Springer. He is a prominent figure in left wing politics, he was even the Democratic mayor for Cincinnati. And while many liberals actually care about the financially less fortunate, Springer uses them to further inflate his already oversized bank account. Whether it be rural "white trash" or people from the ghettos and barrios, his goal appears to be selling the moral plight of the poor to an audience that views this underclass with contempt. The problem is that the lion's share of his audience is the underclass. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that Springer is not presenting his program through a TV, but through a mirror.

Movies like Ringmaster make me mad at people who say the movie studios are going to the dogs. That is an insult to that wonderful animal. Anyhow, this was nothing more than a cheap attempt to cash in on someone whose star rose way too high. Some solace can be taken because near rioting broke out in major cities from people trying to be as far away from the theaters as they could be when this turd of a film opened. Yet, the damage was done. I'm sure that some ambitious, idealistic filmaker got his/her project rejected so this crapola could get greenlighted. Hopefully the studio exec that did so got fired and found a job that suited his personality better - Such as scraping condoms off a Walmart parking lot, or selling cheap Souljah Boy ringtones at a mall kiosk. Or better yet, maybe he's going to be the jilted alcoholic Neo-Nazi lover of a lesbian midget with Irritable Bowel Syndrome on next Tuesday's episode.