I first became aware of this movie when I read about it Won The MySpace Award for Best Documentary at the Newport Beach Film Festival. I saw it at The Valley Film Festival where it too Won Best Documentary and was pleasantly surprised at what I saw. I went in because I thought I was going to see a movie of off-road race trucks (which there was plenty of) but was quickly brought into a very personal story of three men taking on something that was much much bigger then they were, The famed race known as The Baja 1000. It starts out with Jeff Lloyd a kind of mans man with a lust for life and cocktails who has always dreamed of being an off-road racer since he was a child even though he really never had a childhood. He says that his mother committed suicide in front of him when he was a young boy and spent most of his young life homeless. He decides now that he has become successful in business that he wants to race the Baja 1000 (which is a race I have also followed for many years) but does not know exactly how to go about doing it. So he finds an old ex-con named Milo who has spent years around racing to help him get the new team underway. Milo who looks like he may have been a Hells Angels member starts to build a race truck with his "sort of" son Toby who is a plumber by trade. What we quickly discovered is that things start to go wrong from the get go. The truck seems to take much more time then they thought to build and they end up having no time to do a thorough test to see if it will hold up for the 1000 mile race they have ahead of them. The real story is unleashed as they run into many problems both mechanically and emotionally as they go to Mexico and enter the race. I found that the film was a constant ride of ups and downs. It felt like it was a very true experience of what it must be like to be part of this sport. I also got really caught up with the three guys and there own journey of how they dealt with the stress and excitement that was coming at them moment by moment. There was a lot of great race footage shot deep in the Baja and I must admit that even though it seemed to be something that has got to be an all out brutally hard thing to do I now want to race this race more then ever. I think this is one of those films that really captured the inner workings of a new race team and even though I have seen some videos on this subject I have never seen it done like this. This could end up being a classic film on this sport.
