After Rancid hit it big in the late nineties, Tim Armstrong branched out on his own to start Hellcat Records. While Epitaph would still handle the distribution and much of the promotion and marketing for the upstart label, Hellcat would allow Armstrong to sign a more eclectic group of artists and as such their roster includes everything from straight up old school punk rock to psychobilly to ska and power pop.

As the label has grown over the last few years, Armstrong has been documenting some of the events that have helped shape his label and from 2001 through 2004 he and a few cohorts shot footage of pretty much everyone on the label as they toured through various countries on various bills. The end result? An eighty plus minute look at the artists that make up Hellcat Records, named after their ongoing line of compilation CDs, Give 'Em The Boot (itself a line from the early Rancid track, Roots Radicals).

The bulk of the footage is Rancid material, and that only makes sense considering Armstrong, who fronts the band, is the man behind the label. What is interesting about this materail though is that aside from the usual high energy live stuff we've seen from Rancid before (at least via some unofficial bootleg videos and a few promo videos or from the concert experience that they deliver) we also get a pair of laid back moments with the band where the bust out the acoustic guitars and put a different spin on their music. Social Distortion has done this pretty regularly in the past and while Rancid hasn't quite got the same acoustic sound that Mike Ness and company have mastered, the stripped down versions do sound pretty cool, especially when they do a cover of The Stooges' No Fun backstage in Seattle where they're joined by Iggy Pop.

The Tiger Army and Nekromantix tracks are great as well and while I would have liked to have seen more from these guys in the film (they only performon one song each) it's good to see them included as they both bring a different form of spooky psyhobilly to their music. The Horrorpops are fun, as are the US Bombs and Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards are just as good as Rancid live, and again, it's nice to see them included here. The Dropkick Murphy's performance isn't amazing, but I'm partial to their older material by a wide margin and those who dig their newer stuff should enjoy it. Without Shane MacGown on hand to handle certain parts of Good Rats, it just doesn't sound the same.

The complete list of concert performances on this DVD is as follows:

Rancid: Ruby Soho, Roots Radical, Maxwell Murder, As Wicked, Old Friend, No Fun (Acoustic With Iggy Pop), Red Hot Moon, Rats In The Hallway, Avenues And Alleyways, Bloodclot, Radio
Tiger Army: Never Die
F-Minus: Light At The End
Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros: Rudie Can't Fail, Minstrel Boy
Nekromantix: Gargoyles Over Copenhagen
US Bombs: US Bombs
Transplants: One Seventeen
Slackers: And I Wonder
Horror Pops: Julia
Roger Miret And The Disasters: Crucified
Dropkick Murphys: Good Rats
Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards: Skunx
Nerve Agent: Evil
Tim Armstrong And Davey Havok: Knowledge

The late Mr. Strummer's cover of Bob Marley's Redemption Song is also played in the video as part of the Joe Strummer tribute segment in which we see a mural of Joe painted on the wall of a building in New York City. It makes sense that Armstrong would include a tribute to Strummer in his movie. Not only was he signed with Hellcat when he passed away at the all too young age of fifty from a heart attack, but he was also a huge influence on Armstrong's own music. If The Clash didn't exist, it's a safe bet that Rancid would have never happened and if Rancid hadn't happened, there would probably be no such thing as Hellcat Records in the first place. If you want to trace it back to where it all started, if it weren't for Joe Strummer's work, this DVD wouldn't have been made.

While the performance footage is all great stuff, the movie suffers from a couple of notable flaws that, in terms of giving an honest review, need to be mentioned.

First up, there are more than a few times where the movie feels like nothing more than a promotional piece for the record label. When Joe Strummer and Tim Armstrong kick the movie off with lines like 'Hellcat over the world' it's a little too self referential for it's own good. Having a street person play a song about how much Hellcat Records rocks is kind of amusing but again, it's pretty self congratulatory. That being said, I can't halfway blame Armstrong for wanting to celebrate his own success – he's accomplished a lot since his early days in Operation Ivy (where he was billed as 'Lint').

The second problem with the disc is more of a personal preference than anything else, and that's the incessant cutting to black and white. Seeing as the footage wasn't shot on black and white film stock but on video and in color it was then down converted to black and white for artistic reasons – the press release states that it's to give it a 'street influenced style.' I can understand that Armstrong didn't want the visuals to be all that polished, after all, the music is rough and gritty and the look of the movie should reflect that. But the cutting to black and white every few minutes throughout the movie does get a bit annoying especially when the contrast levels are so over the top that at times it washes out the picture. Again, it's obviously been done on purpose and isn't a technical fault in the transfer and it might work for some people but I found it more than a little annoying after the first ten times that it happened.

In the end though, this movie is about the music and it brings plenty of it to the table. Hellcat has a pretty solid and diverse group of punk and punk influenced artists right now and while the malls and record labels may have sucked out a lot of the spirit of punk rock, Hellcat does manage to stay pretty true to the roots of how it all works and how it all used to be before the 'alternative nation' explosion of the nineties. Give 'Em The Boot is a nice selection of performances from a wide selection of the artists on the label and while Rancid gets most of the spotlight, it makes for a nice sampler plate of live music.

Video:

The movie was shot 1.33.1 fullframe and that's how it is presented. Aforementioned artistic and compositional issues aside, the transfer on this DVD is quite good considering that a lot of this footage was shot under rather hectic conditions. The colors, when the video doesn't switch to that glaring black and white, look quite good and the skin tones look natural. The black levels stay strong and the lighting seen on the various stages that the performances take place on makes it through the conversion unharmed. There is some mild edge enhancement in a few scenes but there aren't any issues with compression artifacts to complain about. For a low budget look at various live performances cobbled together over a four year period from various shows around the world, Give 'Em The Boot looks surprisingly nice.