They don’t make ‘80s movies like they used to. I once made that joke in college and someone corrected me that it was because it was the ‘90s. Thanks for that. Well, now maybe I can finally say they do make ‘80s movies like they used to, because Turbo Kid is a wonderful loving homage to ‘80s sci-fi. It even has Michael Ironside as the villain!
In the distant future of 1997, Zeus (Ironside) controls all the fresh water. The Kid (Munro Chambers) travels the wasteland looking for remnants of civilization. He stumbles on the costume and weapons of his favorite comic book character Turbo Rider and takes on the mantle. He also meets an innocent girl named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) whom he protects and discovers more about.
For a genre as tried and true as the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the creators of Turbo Kid sure came up with some inventive costumes. As desolated wastelands though, the world of Turbo Kid is peppered with the colors of ‘80s youth: pastels and fluorescents amid the black and metal armies. Turbo Kid knows it’s following the tradition of Road Warrior and many other sci-fi films, so there are plenty of references and homages. 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 biggest selling point for Turbo Kid is probably going to be the extreme blood and gore. When Kid and Apple fight Zeus’s henchmen, real cinema blood sprays out of every severed stump. The configurations of each kill are clever, and must have been challenging to pull off, but I don’t want to spoil any of them. Perhaps the best way to describe it is there’s a legend of a deleted scene in Commando where Schwarzenegger chops off a bad guy’s arms and beats him with them. That’s never been on a Commando DVD, but Turbo Kid delivers on the dream of that kind of scene.
The team behind Turbo Kid goes by RKSS (Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Wissell), and where they’ve paved their own way (beyond kills we’ve literally never seen before) is in adding absurd touches to their world. Apple’s weapon is a gnome stick. Her character is seems crazy but so sweet she becomes genuinely heartbreaking, through a ridiculous metaphor she uses. This is a team that gets how to satirize without disrespecting the material or the audience. They take a completely sincere tone which makes the absurdity even funnier.
Turbo Kid began as an ABCs of Death short, “T is for Turbo.” Perhaps like Grindhouse, the ABCs franchise can launch a host of expanded features too. I definitely want to see what’s next for RKSS and Leboeuf, and if Chambers can become a new action hero, Franchise Fred approves.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
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