Genre Comedy

Landspeed presents: CKY (1999)

Item: Landspeed presents: CKY
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Landspeed presents: CKY (1999)

Before Jackass was a franchise, before Viva La Bam was a MTV fixture, and before Bam Margera's name meant anything beyond the skate parks of Pennsylvania, there was a VHS tape. Landspeed Presents: CKY, released in 1999 and running a tight sixty-six minutes, is the film that started it all: a lo-fi collection of skateboarding footage, stunts, and assorted mayhem put together by a then-teenage Margera under the banner of his own production outfit, Bam Margera Productions, in association with Landspeed Productions LLC. It circulated through the skate community in the way things did before the internet made distribution effortless, passed hand to hand on copied cassettes, building a word-of-mouth reputation that would eventually help put its central figures on television screens across the world. Whether you come to it as a piece of skateboarding history or simply out of curiosity about where a particular strain of early-2000s youth culture came from, it occupies an oddly significant corner of the period.

Margera, who would go on to direct the subsequent entries in the series, including CKY2K, CKY 3, and CKY 4: The Latest & Greatest, was here working without a real budget, without a crew in any professional sense, and without anything resembling a conventional production structure. The camera work is handheld and functional at best, the kind of footage any group of teenagers with a camcorder might produce on a weekend with nothing better to do. What distinguishes CKY from the average home video, or at least what distinguished it at the time, is the ambition of what the group was willing to put on tape. Margera is joined by a cast of friends and family including Brandon DiCamillo, Ryan Dunn, and his own parents Phil and April Margera (who would become recurring figures across the CKY series), alongside Chris Raab and Rake Yohn. None of them are performers in any trained sense. They are, by any reasonable measure, a group of suburban young men from West Chester, Pennsylvania, who happened to point a camera at themselves and keep filming.

The cultural context is worth pausing on. The late 1990s skate scene had a well-established tradition of video culture, with skate companies producing edited compilations of tricks and travel footage as a primary means of reaching their audience. CKY sits within that tradition but bends it towards something more anarchic and personality-driven, a shift that would prove influential. The tone and format, raw and personality-led rather than technique-focused, fed directly into what became a broader phenomenon in the years that followed. For anyone interested in tracing that lineage, this tape is the practical starting point.

This isn’t a film so much as a VHS-era time capsule. Raw, unfiltered, and aggressively amateur. Landspeed Presents: CKY captures Bam Margera, Brandon DiCamillo, and the proto-Jackass crew before fame, before budgets, and definitely before consequences. Shot on grainy camcorders in backyards, parking lots, and abandoned buildings around West Chester, it’s a chaotic collage of stunts, skits, and outright anti-social behaviour like skateboarding into traffic, dragging products off the shelves at stores, screaming at strangers, and generally testing how much damage a group of bored young men can cause with a camera and no supervision. There’s a certain grim charm in its total lack of polish. The DIY energy, the loyalty between friends, the sheer audacity of some of the stunts. You can see the seeds of what would later become Jqckass and Viva La Bam: the obsession with pain, the juvenile humour, the love of chaos. But unlike those shows, which at least had pacing and editing discipline, CKY has no structure, no punchlines, and very little actual comedy. Too much of it feels less like pranks and more like people being needlessly destructive or just plain assholes. It’s fascinating as a historical document, a glimpse into the origins of a subculture that defined early 2000s youth rebellion. But as a watchable film it's gruelling. The jokes don’t land, the audio is a mess, and the “skits” are often just yelling over loud music. It’s the sound of a group of friends having fun — but not necessarily making it fun.

For me, that tension between historical curiosity and actual watchability is the thing that stays with me most. There's genuine value in seeing where something came from, in watching the rough edges that would later get sanded down into something more polished but arguably less honest. But knowing a thing matters and enjoying it are two very different experiences, and CKY asks quite a lot of your patience for what it gives back. If you're working through the series chronologically, it's an essential stop. If you're coming in cold, I'd suggest having your expectations set accordingly. Some things are best appreciated as artefacts rather than entertainment, and this is very much one of them.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 1999 | Watched: 2025-08-21

View on Letterboxd →

Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Landspeed presents: CKY (1999) on YouTube

Related on Movies With Macca