RADIOACTIVE DREAMS (1986) *

Two boys are locked in an underground bunker as the bombs of WWIII begin to fall.  Having spent their formative years in a fallout shelter reading ‘40s detective novels, Phillip (John Stockwell) and Marlowe (Michael Dudikoff) emerge from the bunker fifteen years later as “atomic dicks”.  Almost immediately, they run smack into a mysterious woman (Lisa Blount) who is on the run from some shady characters who are looking for the keys to the last nuclear warhead left on earth.  Phillip and Marlowe give chase and wind up having many bizarre misadventures in the post-puke landscape. 

There’s a kernel of a good idea here, but writer/director Albert (The Sword and the Sorcerer) Pyun never figures out a way to make it pop.  The odd mix of Mad Max action, ‘40s film noir inspiration, and ‘80s teen comedy doesn’t gel.  The plot is nearly incoherent as our heroes have run-ins with everything from foulmouthed kids that look like Bugsy Malone versions of Al Pacino in Scarface to ‘50s style greasers to mutant cannibals to giant monsters.  None of it remotely works and it feels more like a checklist of shit Pyun wanted to put into a movie than a movie itself.

The incomprehensible plotting has nothing on the dingy cinematography.  Like many of Pyun’s movies of the era, it’s often ugly and unpleasant to look at.  The combination of dark shadows and grimy looking locations and sets make it hard to tell what’s going on some of the time.  The repetitive rock soundtrack gets annoying fast, and many sequences just feel like a bad MTV music video.

For a movie whose characters are obsessed with ‘40s detectives, it really doesn’t lean into the film noir clichés until late in the game.  I’m not sure why it took so long for the film to embrace the genre because these scenes are definitely the strongest stretch of the picture.  It’s still not very good mind you, but it’s certainly better than the cruddy sequences of our heroes hanging out in dark and grody punk rock nightclubs. 

Stockwell isn’t bad, but Dudikoff is thoroughly annoying.  While he was quite good in the American Ninja movies, he’s not much of a comedic actor, and his constant mugging and whiny demeanor are like nails on a chalkboard.  Blount gives the film a fleeting spark, although she is sadly underutilized as the femme fatale.  Even if she was given more to do, I’m not sure it would’ve prevented Radioactive Dreams from being a total snoozer.