Though for most of the film, the information being presented as though it was a real documentary, for some bizarre reason in the last 15 minutes, the movie jumps into third-person omnipresent camera which is both incredibly jarring and completely removes you from the film. In fact, when you’re watching it, if the movie changed around a few small things and finished at around 1.10, or added a completely different ending, it is quite possible that this film would be seen as an enjoyable ‘alternative’ to the Blair Witch. What’s incredibly annoying is that nobody thought to say it to the filmmakers that the ending was just silly. Especially as, if they simply explained the reappearance of the extra film in another way and never were able to reconstruct that final frame, while possibly adding another 10 minutes to unnerve you, the whole thing would be a much better contender for being the best ‘real’ horror documentary out there.

Instead though, you get something that’s an enjoyable, if perhaps somewhat wasteful way of spending a hungover bank holiday Monday..

This November, Simon Evans and Fearghal O’Nuallain will begin the first Irish circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle. Their unsupported expedition will cover over 30,000km, passing through 30 countries and some of the highest, lowest, driest, coldest, warmest and loneliest places on earth. In doing so, they will be promoting the positive contribution that cycling can make to mental health and the environment, raising €100,000 for Aware and highlighting climate change

To get a feel for what the guys will be doing here’s their flickr site and a sample of their videos:

Aswan to Alexandria from revolutioncycle on Vimeo.

As I said in the book review, the DVD works better because wrestling is a visual medium, and the whole documentary works really well as a talking heads example of history. Now plently of the history and things that happened there are covered, though you can’t help but feel that the lack of Raven, Sabu and Shane Douglas harms the production somewhat (many wrestlers who weren’t under contract to WWE at the time were not involved in the DVD). In some ways, its an advertisement for the ‘Forever Hardcore’ documentary that Douglas did afterwards. Yet, despite the fact that it is a ‘WWE produced’ dvd, it seems to cover most of the bases pretty honestly. Many of the individuals involved are quite critical of each other, and so on, but to be honest, until I see ‘Forever Hardcore’ and see what that says about things, I won’t really know how to feel. Basically, its 3-odd hours of solid documentary and well worth a look.

There are one or two serious complaints though, both of which appear in my other reviews of ECW material produced by WWE. Firstly, as I said in the review of the ‘Rise and Fall book’ the whole ECW seccedding from NWA isn’t covered, while it’s mentioned in the book, it has no real role in the DVD. Secondly, I’m fairly sure they have the same ‘Bam Bam Bigelow VS Taz’ match on both the ‘Rise and Fall’ and ‘extreme’ dvds. Seriously! If your going to put out these dvds, try minimise overlap! ECW ran long enough that there should surely be enough good material to go around. Still though, the matches available on the DVD are quite enjoyable, with plenty ‘holy shit!’ moments so….