It’s been nearly a decade since S.R. Bindler’s debut film Hands on a Hard Body reached theaters, and the director hasn’t been heard from since. That’s about to change as Bindler’s first narrative feature, Surfer, Dude, is set to premiere this Friday in an exclusive Austin engagement and expand to more markets the following week. (Watch this space for a review.) The title may make it sound like a Spring Break sequel, but Hard Body is actually a documentary mostly confined to the parking lot of a Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas. Despite this seeming limitation, Hands on a Hard Body is a mini-epic spanning the full spectrum of human emotion. It’s also very difficult to find: used copies of the long out-of-print DVD are going for upwards of $85 on Amazon. But now you can watch Hard Body right there in the privacy of your cubicle.
The movie’s subject is the contest that shares its title, an annual endurance competition (since discontinued after one participant in the 2005 contest killed himself) with a brand new, fully-loaded pickup truck as the grand prize. The rules are simple: keep at least one hand on the truck at all times, but do not lean on the truck to support yourself. Last one standing wins the truck. If visions of Jeff Probst are dancing in your head, it’s worth noting that Hard Body pre-dates the reality TV craze by a year or two, and its elimination structure has provided the template for a wave of documentaries from the little-known Karaoke Fever to the crowd-pleaser Spellbound. If you’ve never seen it, here’s your chance: the full movie can be found on Google Video here.
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