Bustin' Down the Door   Starring: Wayne Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Shaun Tomson, Michael Tomson and Peter Townend Metrodome Distribution RRP: £15.99 MTD5501 Certificate: 15 Available 18 January 2010

The seventies was a time when the sport of surfing would change forever. What had previously been seen as a fringe activity, carried on by drug addled hippies, was going to get a shot in the arm and a rude awakening as young men from Australia and South Africa descended onto the laid back Hawaiian culture, with a style of wave riding that demanded respect. But their desire to turn the pastime into a real sport was destined to be met with resistance...

Bustin' down the Door (2008 - 1 hr, 31 min, 52 sec) is the documentary, directed by Jeremy Gosch, which details this critical time in the sport. The film is narrated by Edward Norton.

I would love to say that I knew something about surfing; I would love to say that I had the vaguest interest in the sport, but I can’t. So it can only be a testament to the film makers’ art that I actually found the film quite absorbing. Who knew people could get to the point of death threats over a sport?

The format of the documentary is fairly mundane as these things tend to be. A collection of contemporary talking heads discussing events, with archive footage from the seventies and like most documentaries of this sort the quality of the picture can be quite variable. But the story that they tell is quite absorbing.

For those in the know, there are contributions from Shaun Tomson, Wayne 'Rabbit' Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Michael Tomson and Peter Townend, the brash young upstarts which not only blew away the competition but had the audacity to dream that the sport could be anything other than a low paying pastime. This lot swanked into Hawaii kicked over the ant hills, and in doing so put a lot of noses out of joint. What couldn’t be challenged was their mastery of the waves.

For fans of surfing the DVD does come with some extras, which kick off with Fuel TV’s Blue Carpet Special (21 min, 11 sec) which looks at the premier of the film. Extended Non Stop Surfing (6 min, 12 sec) is a collection of surfing pics with a particularly uninteresting MOR soundtrack. Founding the ASP (3 min, 14 sec) which does what it says on the can. Formation of the IPS also does the same. The extras also include The North Shore; Hawaiian Legends; Dan Merkel Slide Show; and interviews with Shaun Tomson, Mark Richards, Peter Townsend, Wayne Bartholomew, Michael Tomson and Eddie Rothman. The disc finishes up with the original theatrical trailers and teasers.

Audio comes in two flavours, either stereo 2.0 or a 5.1 track, but let’s face it this isn’t an action movie so the stereo track does quite nicely for most of the picture. The movie is presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer.

One of the things I did hate about the disc was the menu; the splurge for the audio options is so big that it makes it difficult to actually choose the extras menu; in fact the menu is so poor that it made choosing the extras more difficult than it should have been.

I know nothing about surfing, well I didn’t until I saw this, but this solid documentary uses the spectacle of the sport and the personalities of those involved to create something which may have general appeal.

7

Charles Packer