On Any Sunday II

I bought a copy of "On Any Sunday II" to fill a gap in my motorcycle DVD collection because I thought, based on the title and the advertising, that it actually was a sequel to Bruce Brown's definitive 1971 motorcycle documentary film, "On Any Sunday". It's not.

What this movie is is a cheap ripoff that trades on the name of the original film (which the producers must have paid Bruce Brown to use) and blatantly copies some bits from the original-specifically the staged "lost desert racer burns up his bike" bit, and the final sequence with three buddies zooming around on the sand dunes on their motorcycles.

The filmmakers introduce several of the sequences with jokey vintage newsreel clips of train wrecks and goofy motorcycle competitions. This is cheesy high-school-filmmaking-class stuff that has no place in a supposed professional production. The "personal feature" bits with career breakdowns and interviews with a few professional racers of the era are also somewhat amateurish, and do very little to raise the tone of the production.

To be honest, the only things that bring up my rating for this 90-minute fiasco from a two to a five are the sequences about the long-gone Catalina Grand Prix-which is still something of a ripoff of the "Elsinore Grand Prix" sequence in Bruce Brown's 1971 original-and the segments on American motorcycle racing phenomenon Kenny Roberts, who hadn't yet broken through on the professional racing scene when Brown's film was being made.

There is some interesting footage of motocross, speedway, and road racing from the late 1970s in the film, which will be nostalgic for folks whose involvement with motorcycles stretches back that far, but on the whole "On Any Sunday II" is a weak effort; no more than a curiosity compared to Bruce Brown's original "On Any Sunday", which is still the gold standard to which all motorsport documentary films-not just motorcycle -related films-must be measured against.

Speedway bikes should have exploded after this movie! I saw this as a 10-year old in the theater and it was the greatest ad for motocross I could have imagined! Saw it again recently streaming and it was as magical now as it was then.

Great time capsule, beautiful filming. Fantastic!