Glote

30 minutes

• "Chase Does Whiplashes and Gonz Barspin Bunnyhops Stuff"
• "Riding and Stupid Shit"
• "Community College Film Class 101 Homework Assignment"

I'll admit it: I was going into this video with the lowest of expectations. I've found his past videos absolutely unwatchable (Ded is probably the worst video I've ever seen), with lame special effects and sometimes horrible filming — something you'd expect from a 14 year old making his first video, not someone who's done as many as Ells has. For the life of me I can't figure out why every video reviewer uses words like "different" to describe his videos but is afraid to use the word "bad". However, I was actually able to sit through Glote...fast-forwarding in parts, though.

Although Glote is a watchable video — starring Chase Gouin, Mark Gonzales, and Paul Osicka — it's still totally unlistenable. The "soundtrack" sounds like a bunch of low noise recorded through a sock; you'll want to mute the TV and play a CD (I found that James Brown works quite well). And interspersed throughout the video are stupid, pointless "artistic" attempts of showing monsters and gory scenes that belong in a B-movie's dream sequence, not in a riding video...but obviously somebody likes this shit, 'cause they keep buying these videos.

Overall, the riding and filming are good — with the aforementioned riders in it, you'd have to try to screw it up. Chase is seen doing amazing flatland stuff with different brake setups (front & back, just front, and brakeless), Gonz is totally insane bunnyhopping over everything (often barspinning just for fun), and Paul's riding is totally original (too bad there's not a whole lot of him here). But after a while, it gets to be real repetitive: there's so much of Chase here (perhaps too much?) that you see him do about a million whiplash variations, and you end up predicting his tricks before he does them ("...pinky squeaks...megaspin...decade"). But Glote does end on a high note — Gonz's backflip fakie tree ride is nothing short of mind-blowing — before giving you some on screen poetry (yeah, you read that correctly).

Ells Bells, P.O. Box 13362, Scottsdale, AZ 85267-3362