Genre:
Drama
Release Date: 01/22/2001
SubTitles: English/Espanol
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD5.1
Run Time: 115 Minutes
Flags: Violence, Nudity, Adult Situations, Strong Sexual Content, Rape & Sexual Abuse, Not For Children, Adult Language
Distributor/Studio: Lions Gate
Photographer and filmmaker
Larry Clark, who made a controversial feature debut with the disturbing drama
Kids, returns with another disquieting look at amoral and sexually precocious youth.
Bobby (
Nick Stahl) is a high school student growing up in southern Florida in the early '90s.
Bobby is also a borderline psychotic; he frequently lashes out with brutal violence against those around him and especially enjoys humiliating his best friend
Marty (
Brad Renfro). While
Bobby professes to hate and fear homosexuals, he goads
Marty into performing phone sex with men, makes
Marty and his friends watch hardcore gay porn films with him, and may have sexually abused
Marty. But
Marty is hardly the only victim of
Bobby's abuse;
Bobby has sexually assaulted
Marty's girlfriend
Lisa (
Rachel Miner) and more than once has barged in on the couple while they were making love.
Lisa's best friend
Ali (
Bijou Phillips) has also been raped by
Bobby, and he has mistreated nearly everyone in their circle of friends. One night,
Marty,
Lisa,
Ali, and several others decide
Bobby's cycle of abuse must stop. But their solution is as ugly as the problem -- the teens stab
Bobby, slit his throat, crush his head with a baseball bat, and throw his body into the bay, where the remains will be eaten by alligators.
Bully is based on a book by journalist
Jim Schutze, which recounted the facts of the 1993 murder of
Bobby Kent, who after years of abusing his friends and classmates, was killed by seven of his acquaintances in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. As with
Kids,
Larry Clark's startlingly graphic depiction of sex, violence, and drug use among teenagers crossed the boundaries of what the MPAA could permit in an R-rated film, and the picture's distributors chose to release the film without a rating.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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