The retired Motocross guys sitting next to me at Crusty Demons: The Next Level were really cool and funny and nice, and they probably wouldn't have given me a curb job even though I'm a big Jew.
Despite the high rage quotient of the gnarly (and extreme!) film—which is the sixth in the line of Crusty Demonses, and which will knock you in the back of the head with an Allen wrench soundtrack by our boys in Burnin Groove and (hed)pe, along with some guys called Ozzy Osbourne and Motrhead—there are only a couple of featured riders who would tie you to the back of a pickup truck and drag you down the highway until your liver falls out to be pecked by armadillos. The rest are cool, bra. They just wanna party! And ride Motocross! Freestyle!
I was not expecting to have—oh, what would you call it?—fun at Crusty Demons, since I usually feel about HB Motocross knuckleheads the way I feel about a roiling case of scabies. But that just goes to show you: I'm a fuckin' moron because Crusty Demons fuckin' rocked my body, man!
Adrenaline Theater's showings of Crusty Demons are screening at only 44 theaters across the country; one of them is the Block at Orange, where you can get all fuckin' rad at 10:30 p.m. each Friday and Saturday night until Jan. 20. Well, you can if you call about a week ahead for tickets. It's big with the kids.
The flick is a travelogue of partying (boring) and guys leaping their motorbikes across giant culverts, doing backflips and headstands on their bikes, and sometimes crashing headfirst into apartment buildings and eating extreme shit. With jackhammer music and fast edits, it's a brain-cell-free soiree. The first bit of dialogue doesn't come for a good 10 minutes; some guys offroading in an SUV lose their traction and flip like a Suzuki bitch, breaking their windows and slashing up their arms. “What happened, guy?” “Rolled her over, bro.” It's Minimalism at its finest; if no other words were spoken in the film, it would be just keen.
There's only one lame segment, in which the legendary Bubba performs a skit with a bunch of grommets, taking them offroading in a schoolbus and then perpetrating some boring dune buggy tricks. The rest—especially when our heroes are riding around Macchu Picchu, and the suspense of whether they would actually be ill-mannered enough to ride motorbikes down the spiritual ruins—keeps one happily occupied.
When Warren Miller began making his extreme ski films, he invented the use of special effects like “throw snow in front of the camera when the skier shushes by” and “tilt the camera uphill so the slope looks more gnarly.” Crusty Demons understands the magic. Rock on.
CRUSTY DEMONS: THE NEXT LEVEL WAS DIRECTED BY WARREN MILLER; PRODUCED BY DANA NICHOLSON AND JON FREEMAN; AND STARS CAREY HART, MIKE JONES, MIKE CINQMARS, SETH ENSLOW, RONNIE FAISST, LARRY LINKOGLE AND BUBBA. NOW PLAYING AT THE AMC THEATERS AT THE BLOCK AT ORANGE, 20 THE CITY BLVD. W., ORANGE. THROUGH JAN. 20. CALL (800) 882-1238 OR GO TO WWW.ADRENALINETHEATER.COM FOR $6 TICKETS.
