François Simard
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The film has the "Mad Max" mindset except instead of freakish muscle cars everyone rides altered BMX bikes.
While retro cinema has long become an overexposed trend in itself, "Turbo Kid" is one of the best examples, working as a nostalgic love letter and a cheesy spin on "Mad Max", making its timing pretty darn perfect.
After making a slew of shorts during the past decade, Montreal film collective Roadkill Superstars (RKSS) finally drops their feature debut Turbo Kid, into which they stuff Eighties Mad Max rip-offs and youth-driven B-movies (Solarbabies, BMX Bandits) in a blender to create a satisfying (if blood-drenched) smoothie of awesomeness.
A fun satirical flashback to 1980s “Mad Max” knockoffs and more juvenile post-apocalyptic adventures like “Prayer of the Roller Boys,” “ Turbo Kid ” reps the first feature (after numerous shorts) from Anouk Whissell, Francois Simard and Yoann-Karl Whissel, the Quebec trio known as RKSS (Road Kill Super Stars).
Turbo Kid on the other hand—written and directed by the trio of Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell—is a loving send up of the glut of cheap international post-apocalyptic knock offs that Mad Max helped spawn throughout the 1980s.
It is unsparingly violent, yet the target audience for this Mad Max meets BMX Bandits blood-gusher seems to be under-17 youth.
Though the movie's villains owe mainly to Mad Max, its plot moves to a poppier beat, with its dirtbike chases recalling 1983's BMX Bandits (which starred newcomer Nicole Kidman) and dozens of more famous, mostly forgotten Hollywood productions in which adolescents get into grown-up trouble.
There's a lot of winking going on here that genre fans will recognize; everything from "Army of Darkness" ("This is my gnomestick!"), to "Soylent Green", and of course, George Miller's "Mad Max" movies.
You’d frankly be upset if there wasn’t a Soylent Green reference at one point, and there’s a well paid off answer to the old “stopping a bullet” cliché.
The Kid may in one scene use a pile of old VHS tapes as kindling for his fire, but it is from such materials that Turbo Kid has itself been forged – and much as the apocalypse survivors here drink water that has been extracted from human corpses, this is a film that cannibalises other films (not least Soylent Green, whose title is evoked by a cereal product named ‘Soleil vert’).
With its vibrant visual style and outrageously colorful use of gore, the comparisons between "Hobo with a Shotgun" and "Turbo Kid" are more than warranted; even "Hobo" director Jason Eisener has a small cameo in the film.
It's easy to see how that would have been the case, and it shares more than a few stylistic similarities with Jason Eisener's violent B-movie, "Hobo with a Shotgun", which makes sense considering Eisener exec-produces and has a small cameo.
Like Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun, Turbo Kid is a conscious bolt-on to a canon of low-budget exploitation movies, made when belts were tight but concepts high.
Originally submitted as an entry for one of producer Ant Timpson’s ABCs of Death anthologies, but then expanded to feature length, Turbo Kid is, along with Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun (2011), Lowell Dean’s WolfCop (2014) and David Sandberg’s Kung Fury (2015), a loving postmodern pastiche of Eighties excess, setting (with hilariously daft incongruity) its extreme sadism and gore alongside a great deal of sweetness and genuine charm.
Jason Eisener, he of Hobo With a Shotgun and the “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” segment from V/H/S/2, produced the film, and it shows.
Co-writers/directors François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell show a clear affection for the genre, but this isn’t a spoof that pokes fun at cheap and cheesy classics like The New Barbarians or the Patrick Swayze flick Steel Dawn.
Feeling like if George Miller (Mad Max) had remade the 1989 kids classic, The Wizard, Turbo Kid is pure cinematic ecstasy with the filmmakers’ enthusiasm for their influences lovingly shining through in truly clever and wondrous ways.
Before that, the Kid befriends Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), a pink-haired girl whose bizarrely enthusiastic optimism in the face of the apocalypse recalls Will Ferrell's role in Elf.
Ant Timpson is making his feature directorial debut here, but he’s been a relevant voice as a genre producer for years now helping shepherd absolute gems like Housebound (2014), Turbo Kid (2015), and Deathgasm (2015) into existence.
Timpson, making his directorial debut here, is best known for producing the ABCs of Death anthology series, Turbo Kid , Deathgasm and (a movie I loathed) The Greasy Strangler .
As one can imagine, it’s not really easy writing a spoiler-free review for a film were a great deal of the entertainment comes from not knowing what comes next, but I can give you a reminder that aside from this being Ant Timpson’s narrative directorial debut (coming from his own warped mind but written by Toby Harvard), he has also served as a producer for equally bizarre and violent flicks such as Turbo Kid and The Greasy Strangler, of which Come to Daddy assuredly fits.
Timpson makes his feature debut with Come to Daddy , which follows the same frenetic, gross-out loopy path of his work as a producer ( Turbo Kid , The Greasy Strangler ).
But then you factor in that it was written by Toby Harvard, the mind behind the completely bonkers The Greasy Stranger and unnerving “G is for Grandad” segment in ABCs of Death 2 , and directed by Ant Timpson, producer of genre faves like The Greasy Strangler , Turbo Kid , and Deathgasm , it’s pretty much a guarantee that Come to Daddy won’t be your average midnighter.
This is the directorial debut of Ant Thompson, one of the producers of Turbo Kid and a contributor to The ABCs of Death franchise.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Turbo Kid (2015)
The violence would have caused heart attacks among those who objected to the PG rating given to 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Some express this nostalgia overtly with success (see “Stranger Things,” “Turbo Kid,” “It“), while others wear those obvious references poorly and awkwardly (“Bumblebee“).
Jason Eisener, he of Hobo With a Shotgun and the “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” segment from V/H/S/2, produced the film, and it shows.
The directing trio of François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell gave us the pop culture pastiche of "Turbo Kid" in 2015.
The directors are Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, who together also directed the film Turbo Kid.
From the French Canadian filmmaking collective RKSS (short for “Roadkill Superstar”) – real names François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell – comes a second feature, Summer of 84 , following on the heels of their auspicious 2015 debut, the outrageously silly (and fun in a twisted, sick way) 1980s post-apocalyptic homage Turbo Kid .
Directing trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell exploited a similar retro vibe in the giddy, gonzo Turbo Kid (2015), but here it feels somewhat superfluous, tacked onto a standard serial-killer-next-door thriller.
The directing trio of François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell gave us the pop culture pastiche of "Turbo Kid" in 2015.
Summer of '84 displays plenty of lo-fi moxie in the production design department, as Turbo Kid retro auteurs François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell (otherwise known as RKSS) adapt Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith's freshman screenplay with no-budget flair.
RKSS—the Montreal filmmaking collective comprised of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell—continue to follow the throwback thread of their first feature “Turbo Kid” with “Summer of ’84,” making its International Premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival.
There's a lot of winking going on here that genre fans will recognize; everything from "Army of Darkness" ("This is my gnomestick!"), to "Soylent Green", and of course, George Miller's "Mad Max" movies.
No names in the cast either, other than Michael Ironside (“Scanners,” “Total Recall”).
Originally submitted as an entry for one of producer Ant Timpson’s ABCs of Death anthologies, but then expanded to feature length, Turbo Kid is, along with Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun (2011), Lowell Dean’s WolfCop (2014) and David Sandberg’s Kung Fury (2015), a loving postmodern pastiche of Eighties excess, setting (with hilariously daft incongruity) its extreme sadism and gore alongside a great deal of sweetness and genuine charm.