Meet teenaged layabout Walter Rhum, who wants nothing more than to become a skateboarding star like his idol, Blair Stanley. His plan? Submit a video of his bag of tricks to legendary conglomerate Machotaildrop, then kick back and coast. When his presence is requested at the company’s remote, mysterious fortress, he thinks he’s got it made, but Walter is about to find out that fame, fortune and even skateboarding can be way totally fraught with complications.
Equal parts surreal comedy, fable and indictment of our co-opting, logo-glutted culture – and 110 per cent just plain weird – Corey Adams and Alex Craig’s slyly funny Machotaildrop is only tangentially related to other skateboarding movies. In fact, it has far more in common with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Zéro de conduite than Dogtown and Z-Boys. (Many of the principal performers and most of the extras can barely stay upright on their boards.)
The film is populated with all manner of eccentrics and obsessives, including Machotaildrop’s owner, the Baron, a grandiloquent former high-wire acrobat now confined to a wheelchair; the sinister Dr. Manfred; the Baron’s creepy majordomo, Perkins; the Librarian, the only girl in the compound; assorted “stars” like the permanently embittered Blair Stanley; and a screeching, often indecipherable martinet, who’s the ostensible leader of a gang of skateboarding anarchists known as the Manwolfs.
Machotaildrop backs up its loopy, idiosyncratic indictment of our consumerist culture on the most basic level.There’s a decidedly second-hand look to the proceedings – a Value Village aesthetic. Everything in the movie seems to have been made in the eighties or earlier and rescued from somebody’s attic.
This thrift-shop principle is evident in the film’s distinctive sensibility, which is simpatico with the work of Canadian mavericks like John Paizs and Guy Maddin, while invoking Jean Vigo and head movies (one of the performers seems to have escaped from El Topo). Yet for all that, the film seems completely unselfconscious, devoid of overt influence and defiantly singular. It is definitely something new (and strange) under the sun. —tiff.net
What's intended as a wry, satirical send-up of the professional skateboarding industry instead ends up missing the mark, falling pretty flat. The laughs are few and far between and I get the feeling if they had made it less ridiculous or less family friendly it could have been much more. Nice to see Rick McCrank get some screen time tho. Maybe him and Jason Lee can hook up for something. 2.5 stars
