“Rotten To The Core” With Jordy Smith, Jay Davies, Jack Freestone, Andrew Doheny and More

For months now Matt Wybenyga’s been telling me about his new movie. He’s been talking about it in the water at Uppers. He’s been texting me about it when we both should be working. He’s been emailing me preview clips. And today he sent me a note that he was releasing his new edit into the wild. Finally, “Rotten to the Core,” a sponsorless, independent joint has dropped.

“It’s something different,” says Matt, who calls San Clemente home. “Just a little something I’ve been working on in my spare time.”

The fact of the business is that Matt’s one of those unsung heroes that’s been slinging his camera and tripod around the world for years, baking in the sun on the beach while the world’s best shake their tail feathers. He’s a documentarian doing the thankless work that fills up your Facebook feed. After bouncing around and shooting projects for everyone from Billabong to ESPN, to river bores in China, he’s got hard drive upon hard drive of clips stashed away in his home office (which his wife just relocated to the garage).

“I had to do something with all this footage, it was too good to let it just sit and rot,” says Matt. “I just wanted to make a surf movie without all that corporate nonsense, something that kind of got back to the roots of surf videos.”

Mission accomplished. Vibing on a punk rock motif, with quotable lines from Archy, Bruce Brown and other beatific “losers,” and action from the likes of Jordy Smith, Jay Davies, Jack Freestone, Droid, The Spartan, Eric Geiselman and a slew of other talent, Matt delivers everything you need and nothing you don’t.