Filled with crazy skate tricks and the most terrible tragedy, All this Mayhem, directed by Eddie Martin and produced by Vice Films is a skateboard film that has a storyline that keeps on surprising. Brothers Tas and Ben Pappas embody a rise and fall narrative that belongs on the stage – except that theatre-goers would say it was unbelievable. These are brothers who think nothing of jumping from a moving train whilst it is going over a bridge, landing in the river below – and getting a mate to film it. They would never claim to be sensible, but then it was the slightly deranged attitude that fed into their skating and took them to the top.
Built from archive footage and interviews with skaters of the time, the story unfolds like a piece of outlandish fiction. It has the gripping, incident-laden plot and brash characters that make an audience take notice. It documents the craziest moments in the lives of two crazy Aussies for whom nothing but skating had ever existed. This is Don’t do this at home stuff, but it is riveting, giving an uncompromising view of what went wrong when cash, fame and the best skateboarders in the world all came together with nose-glowingly large quantities of drugs.
On the upside, the brothers Pappas made it to the top of the pro-skateboarding vert ramp. On the downside, almost everything else in their lives went spectacularly wrong. The stories of most sportsmen will have an arc that peaks with great success and then falls away as they lose their abilities. The two brothers didn’t give it long enough for their slkills to fail them. Instead they wholeheartedly embraced excess, with drugs being the familiar helper on the trip down. Although Tas was involved in making this documentary it does not flinch from showing the depths of despair to which both brothers were taken.
From the rough side of Melbourne Tas and Ben lived the skater dream. They went to the USA and beat Tony Hawks with the new street-style skate tricks that they brought to the vert ramp. By the late-Nineties, success – however you want to measure it – was theirs.
That good part lasts more than half of the film and is filled with archive footage. Luckily for the filmmakers skateboarding was one of the earliest sports to embrace video, and all the major competitions of the period are recorded. So are many practice sessions and parties that demonstrate that the life of a pro skater was not one of healthy living and getting your five-a-day.
When the fall comes they just keep falling. The reversal is comprehensive and covers much more than losing their skating skills or being beaten by better skaters. What happens is much more of a whole life collapse. Both Ben and Tas make mistakes, but events takeover and race them in directions that you do not see coming.
The film has had no access to Tony Hawk, who was the brothers’ greatest competitor in their skate competitions. Tas sees him as a relic from the past, someone who was protected by the sport against the Pappas’ more anarchic brand of skating. It would have been good to have heard his view on the period and his take on the Pappas stories.
All this Mayhem is not just for skateboard fans. It’s a snapshot of how quickly and thoroughly things can go horribly wrong, and is a cautionary tale par excellence. No doubt tragic flaws are hidden within us all, but they usually only lead to such terrible consequences in the theatre.
I just watched this doc on Netflix and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had no idea about skating and the role they played on it. There were many things to take away from this film, but one of the lighter things is how the brothers got robbed by the tony hawk favoritism. I who know nothing of the sport could easily see how the two brothers made Hawks tricks look amateurish.