Casual Fridays: Season Four

The concept is pretty straightforward: gather a pile of the worst television footage you can find and string it together to create a 95-minute pastiche of perversion and general badness. But the concept in practice is far more convoluted and queer. The result covers all of the most important aspects of popular culture — embarrassing childhood performances, punk rock (including Billy Idol's regrettable cyberpunk thing), sex and porno, politics, Americanism and militarism, weight loss ("if you love the food, the food can't love you back"), drugs, cops and criminals, boy bands, monkeys riding dogs —in the most disturbing, omniscient ways. Bad commercials you've maybe seen before mesh with low-budget cable network shows. Captivating lunatics of Anne Heche proportion follow news reporters accidentally saying "blow job" instead of "block party," in reference to J-Lo's ex-neighbourhood. In the end, it could be a comment on the poor quality and absolute disgracefulness of North American culture, but you get the sense that this is more likely trash for trash's sake, a revolting "oh my god make it stop" celebration of humiliation and degeneration, and that's fine too. The biggest turn off you just cannot stop watching, TV Carnage's Casual Fridays will at least entertain the sleazy nether regions of your brain and being. If you don't lose your lunch too quickly. Extras: drunk commentary; "Hairdresser" extended clip; "Boom" extended clip; "Strip Club DJs" mini-documentary clip. (TV Carnage, www.tvcarnage.com)