Doc shows daredevil was ahead of his time

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This article was published 05/08/2011 (5494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More than 20 years ago, St. Catharines, Ont. self-styled cable-access star Ralph Zavadil, a.k.a. Cap’n Video, looked exactly like the kind of headbanger so accurately lampooned in Fubar.

With his stylish mullet, his penchant for smoking weed, his minimal wardrobe and a capacity for self-abuse that makes Johnny Knoxville look like your old Aunt Mary, Zavadil is a kind of embodiment of a party-hard credo. (Zavadil does in fact use the expression “give ‘er” without irony.)

Now in his 40s, he still seems to party pretty hard, knowing he is kind of lucky to be alive at all. The documentary opens with unedited footage of the good Cap’n’s most notorious stunt. On a chilly day, he climbed a ladder with the intention of jumping into the centre of a swimming pool to demonstrate, evidently, the most dangerous method of taking off a pool cover. Zavadil ended up taking a header into concrete before landing and almost drowning in that pool, with two vertebrae broken. (The footage has been widely seen all over the world, but when I saw it, I practically jumped out of my chair in horror, as a few of my workmates may attest.)

Director Jay Cheel’s documentary catches up with Zavadil two decades later, and in lo-fi VHS style, rewinds through the guy’s life.

Zavadil recalls his relationship with motorcycle racer Nancy Dewar. He revisits his mid-life discovery that he had a daughter from a previous relationship. And of course, he offers his recollections of some of his most crazy stunts, such as snorting raw eggs, setting his face on fire as a radical shaving technique, and “rooftop tobogganing” (that is, sliding down his own perilously peaked rooftop in winter wearing only a bathing suit). The stunt that got him expelled from the airwaves involved hanging a rabbit like a pinata from his doorway and chucking raw eggs at it as a key segment of his “Easter special.” The self-professed animal lover is outraged that some distressed viewers interpreted this stunt as animal cruelty.

This is the one scene in which Zavadil demonstrates he may actually be as stupid or deluded as those Fubar characters, although director Cheel takes his side, pointedly showing Zavadil attending the birth of his dog’s puppies as proof. (This feels like a transparent exercise in damage control, like showing a Lehman Brothers exec helping his child balance his bank account to prove his fiscal responsibility.)

But you still have to admire Zavadil for his creativity, if not his good judgment. The film is steeped in the irony that Zavadil was ahead of his time in the stunt game, just a few years too early to cash in on the Jackass franchise.

And Cheel’s film does work as a celebration of his ethos. Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera and the rest of the Jackass crew risk their lives for our amusement and reap millions of dollars.

Zavadil, bless him, was happy to do it for nothing.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MOVIE REVIEW

Beauty Day

Directed by Jay Cheel

Cinematheque

104 minutes

14A

3 stars out of five