Turbo Kid (2015)
Directed by François Simard
In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, an orphaned teen must battle a ruthless warlord to save the girl of his dreams.
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12 films that influenced Turbo Kid
What critics say influenced Turbo Kid
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.