Sportbike Hype I

This video could have just as easily been called Crusty Demons of Asphalt due to its similarity to that well-known freestyle-motocross video. Like the Crusty series, Hype (DVD, $29.95) is all over the place. Of course there is loads of blistering music behind a constantly changing roster of street-freestyle stars, everyone from Kyle Woods of Florida's XXXTreme to European Stunt Champion Kevin Carmichael. But what really pulls you in is the sheer strangeness of the content, and the weird juxtapositions it forms: Wacky montages of guys doing knee-downs in a driveway (!) are mixed in with old NASA footage (?), an assortment of silly comedy sketches, cheesecake shots of bikini babes and some of the weirdest stunts yet recorded on tape. How weird? Someone is caught on film doing tail-dragger wheelies on a Honda GL1800 Gold Wing, if you can get your head around that. In another sequence, members of Redline Extreme are actually pole-vaulting a motorcycle while it's executing a vicious, circle burnout. After an extended display of some of the sport's premier moves, everything from ape hangers to the Captain America, viewers are treated to the most incredible feat of all--footage of a massive, nighttime sportbike ride-out involving more than 400 motorcycles, and we don't see a single rear-ender or other wreck. Not one. Unbelievable.