Imagine giving your kids a lot of cool, expensive equipment; boats, rafts, a small arsenal of various kinds of fly fishing gear, a complete camping outfit and enough spending money to keep them in coffee, booze and cheap feed for a few weeks of unsupervised fun. That’s kind of what came to mind while watching Metalhead II. Am I jealous, hell yes.
This show basically covers a trout bum steelheading adventure in British Columbia, something anyone of us would love to do. The idea of doing a film on steelheading sounds great but it quickly becomes apparent that this show is more about the trials and tribulations of “trout bumming” than it is about getting down to some serious fishing.
Most of the film is spent in overly long dialogs about hard ass border cops, life in camp, cursing foul weather, getting the truck out of the mud and uncooperative fish. These are always part of the program so to speak, but not the program, in my opinion. It did make a couple passing comments on the current declines in wild fish populations but there was no real fork in the frog conviction to it.
This film would be a lot more interesting and entertaining if it had edited out about three quarters of the “slumming” and put in a lot more time actually covering the steelhead, steelhead country and of course, steelhead (or metalhead) fishing.
There was however, enough river footage and leaping “metalheads” to make you want to get the maps out and knock the winter cob webs and dust off the equipment and head for the river.
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