Genre Comedy

CKY2K (2000)

Item: CKY2K
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — CKY2K (2000)

By the year 2000, backyard skating videos were hardly a new phenomenon, but Bam Margera and his West Chester, Pennsylvania circle were doing something a little different with the format. Where most skate videos kept things focused on the board, the CKY crew (the name taken from Margera's brother Jess's band, Camp Kill Yourself) were just as interested in pranks, stunts, and general mayhem as they were in any actual skateboarding. The result was a series of self-distributed tapes that built a devoted cult following through word of mouth, copied VHS dubs, and early internet communities, long before that kind of grassroots video culture had a proper name. CKY2K is the second entry in that series, running to a brisk 63 minutes and covering ground that ranges from a chaotic group trip to Iceland to, shall we say, some sequences that are not for the faint of stomach. It sits in an interesting moment in time: just before Margera and several of his crew crossed over into the mainstream through the Jackass franchise, and before this kind of content found a permanent home on television and online platforms.

The film was produced through Bam Margera Productions and 10/90 Films, with Margera himself directing, as he did across the CKY series (his work on Landspeed presents: CKY the year before established the rough template, and he would carry the same approach into CKY 3 and CKY 4: The Latest & Greatest). The production values are, to put it charitably, functional: consumer-grade cameras, no real crew to speak of, and an editing style that favours chaos over craft. That is, of course, rather the point. The camera work is handheld and frequently shaky, the sound recording is inconsistent, and the whole thing has the texture of footage you were never quite meant to see. Alongside Margera, the regular faces include Brandon DiCamillo, Ryan Dunn, and Jess Margera, with Leo Fitzpatrick also appearing. These are not trained performers working from a script; they are a group of friends filming each other doing increasingly inadvisable things, which gives the whole enterprise an energy that more polished but unremarkable productions rarely manage to replicate.

For context on where this sits in the broader landscape: Margera would later become a familiar face to much wider audiences through the Jackass films, with later outings such as Jackass Number Two reaching mainstream cinema release. But CKY2K predates all of that, and carries the rougher, more lawless feeling of something made entirely outside any commercial framework, for an audience of friends and fellow travellers first. Whether that rawness is a feature or a flaw rather depends on what you are coming to it for.

This is my childhood. Early Bam and crew defined my entire teenage years. Me and my friends must have watched this hundreds of times. Rewatched it last night and it's still hilarious. Childish and at times disgusting but so funny and so entertaining. It's super poorly made but you don't watch it for the cinematography

I think that last point is really what it comes down to. There is a version of watching CKY2K where all you see is a poorly lit, loosely assembled collection of stunts and gross-out moments, and that reading is not entirely wrong. But nostalgia is a powerful lens, and for those of us who grew up passing these tapes around, the rough edges are part of what makes it feel real and alive in a way that more produced content never quite did. It is the kind of thing you either get or you do not, and no amount of critical distance is going to change that. Some films just belong to you.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2025-08-12

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