Tuesday, January 23, 2018

TURBO KID (2015) ***


Grindhouse wasn’t an out-and-out financial success, but it was popular enough to inspire a wave of faux ‘80s exploitation movies.  This subgenre has a tendency to be maddingly uneven though.  For every classic like Hobo with a Shotgun, there's bound to be more than a few Manborgs.  Thankfully, Turbo Kid is one of the good ones. 

Turbo Kid is like a cross between an Ozploitation post-apocalypse actioner and a low-budget rip-off of an Amblin movie.  It even feels like an ‘80s flick as it utilizes many of the fads that were so popular back in that glorious decade.  It may be “the future” (1997 to be exact), but Power Gloves, arm wrestling, and BMX bikes somehow managed to survive the apocalypse.  

In the futuristic wasteland, a teenager (Munro Chambers) ekes out a meager existence by reading comic books and scavenging.  His solitary life is thrown for a loop when he happens upon an energetic android (Laurence Laboeuf) who is all-too eager to become his best friend.     When she is kidnapped by the evil Zeus (Michael Ironside), the kid uses his magic turbo suit (which he found inside an abandoned UFO) to save her.

There are bits here that steal from Mad Max, Rad, and Laserblast.  Directors Francoise Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell could’ve easily relied on a making pastiche of ‘80s films and called it a day.  However, they imbue it with just enough heart to make you care about the characters.  Chambers and Laboeuf make for a great team and Ironside (who looks like he’s having a ball) is enormously entertaining as the heavy.  

The filmmakers have fun staging the action.  Imagine Mad Max, but with BMX bikes and that should give you an idea of what they were going for.  They blow the gore up to cartoonish heights too.  Try to keep track of how many times someone is blown in half.  Sure, Turbo Kid has trouble sustaining its premise over an entire feature, but I guarantee fans of ‘80s post-apocalyptic action movies will walk away with a big-ass grin on their face after watching this one.

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