CKY Trilogy Round 1 (1999) (NTSC)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Sports	Main Menu Audio Additional Footage Featurette-Making Of
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	44:52
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Bam Margera
Studio Distributor	Landspeed Stomp Visual	Starring	Rakeyohn Chris Aspite Mike Maldonado Kerry Getz Deron Miller Mark Hanna Chris Hanna The Gill
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	None Given

    Plot? What plot?

    CKY started its evolution as a skating video, and now has a Jackass fanbase. Why Jackass? Because this is where Jackass came from.

    Professional skater Bam Margera, a professional skater and little rich boy, funded this production involving himself and other skaters, stuntmen, would-be bad actors, and total fools doing what they consider crazy things on camera. The skaters barely complete any successful tricks, the stuntmen make death-defying jumps, the would-be bad acting (all Brandon DiCamillo - he is as bad an actor as you can get) is not funny.... but when it comes to the total fools, they do what they do best, and get the best laughs. Throwing a dummy off a bridge onto a car, getting hit in the head with many items, as well as hitting heads against others, riding on vehicles unrestrained...it's a wonder that no one got killed, no matter how much you think some of them deserve to.

    CKY was unheard of until Jackass became popular. Several members of the CKY team moved over to the Jackass team, which I believe was to gain popularity. After this success, people flocked back to the earlier works of Bam Margera and gang. You can see that over time the stunts became more elaborate, the skating became more interesting, but the acting still remains shocking.

Video

    I cannot understand the release of NTSC DVDs in Region 4. Still, here is yet another one. Converting to the PAL format would not have helped the quality of this disc in any way, however, it would have helped make the disc available to a wider audience, some of whom can only view PAL DVDs.

    The production was shot on videotape using Sony DCR hand-held cameras, and it shows throughout. Shaky camera handling, uneven shooting angles, bad zooming. What else would you expect from a low budget home-made production?

    The image is very soft image throughout. Colour is pretty bland, which I blame on the source video. At 30:20 through to 30:30 there was noticeable aliasing. MPEG artefacts are not present.

    The overall quality is quite disappointing. It is understandable due to the quality of the source material, but doesn't make it any easier to watch.

    There are no subtitles on this disc. The disc is dual-layered, however I believe the layer change is placed in between titles, as I could not locate a layer change anywhere. It is only slightly over the size of a single layered disc, but if the image was compressed any more, I'm sure there would be a few compression issues.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    A single 2.0 channel English soundtrack is present, not that anything more is required. It is encoded at 384kbps. The quality ranges from very average to very poor.

    A lot of the time dialogue is muffled and unable to be understood. This is mainly due to the outdoors filming, and no ADR would have been used on a low-budget production such as this. At 2:55 this is most evident, as I was able to hear parts of the dialogue fading in and out. It isn’t so much of a problem during skating and stunt scenes, but when doing skits it becomes a real problem, as most of the skits involve a considerable verbal component. At 34:15 and 36:00 in the documentary, hissing and static was noted to be emanating mainly from the left speaker. It was very distracting, and as it continued over several scenes I blame this on the sound not being mastered very well. Audio sync is pretty accurate, due to the fact that no ADR was used.

    Music is the best thing about this soundtrack. Containing skater music, including the band of the main title itself, it does more than provide background music, and indeed overpowers the dialogue at certain times. The music provides the only low frequencies in the feature, which switched my subwoofer on from time to time. When there is no music, there is no subwoofer activity. There is virtually no surround channel usage. I got up and put my ear to the rear speakers, to hear only the very faintest of music. The only other time a surround channel was used was for dialogue used in the first 15 seconds of the documentary.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Main Menu Audio

    A static menu with a song from the soundtrack playing in the background. With the option of selecting either the main feature or the documentary, the main menu also has the option to select chapters. The chapters for each feature have titles for each stunt, but does not have pictures to give a clue as to what is to be selected.

Additional Footage (13:15)

    Interestingly enough, there is an extra feature contained within the main feature. When the main feature is completed, it continues on to another feature on Track 3. Containing several new stunts and skits, I am wondering why it wasn't added to the main feature.

Featurette-Making Of

    This is a documentary on the making of, and behind the scenes of, CKY. It contains many scenes from the main feature, and explains its inspiration, planning and how it was carried out. I found this to be more entertaining than the main feature itself.

    The R4 release appears to be the exact same disc as has been released in all other regions. Only the cover has been changed to include the Australian classification.

    What would you expect from a bunch of idiots doing stunts, skaters doing tricks, and bad actors attempting to do skits?

    The video was disappointing, the audio on par with the video. There is absolutely no plot to be seen - even the skits have no point to them.

    The extras are not really extras - they could have all been thrown into one main feature, cutting out several useless scenes.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall