If you mashed up Star Wars, Mad Max, and Napolean Dynamite, you’d get something that looks a lot like Turbo Kid. The question is, of course, what kind of sick weirdo tries to mash up Star Wars, Mad Max, and Napolean Dynamite?

Because of that deliberately odd sensibility, it’s hard to say if Turbo Kid is a “good” film. It wears its eighties inspired cheesy aspirations on its sleeve, clearly taking the idea of not taking itself seriously very seriously indeed.

In the futuristic wasteland of 1999, where water is scarce and robots have risen against their human makers, we find the Kid wandering through what is left of the world, scavenging old bits of bric a brac in order to trade for clean water and the latest back-issue of the Turbo Rider comic book.

The plot, such as it is, involves the Kid teaming up with Apple, the post-apocalyptic iteration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, to defeat the evil Zeus, who has an Soylent Green-inspired plot to turn people into water. Or something. Some people get exploded by laser beams, and hundreds of gallons of blood spray from countless over-the-top dismemberments.

There’s not much about this movie that makes what is commonly thought of as “sense,” but again, that seems to be the point. Zeus’s enforcer, a voiceless thug named Skeletron, rides around on a bicycle, has a skull mask, and dispatches his victims with an arm-mounted sawblade launcher. At one point the Kid finds the crashed ship of what appears to be the actual Turbo Rider and takes his arm mounted laser cannon. Several people turn out to be robots.

There’s a certain charm to all of this, but the film sacrifices focus for fun, and there are moments that seem to be written as cheeseball but somehow get played straight. Turbo Kid is trying to emulate the low-budget eighties action movie with a healthy dose of weird slapped on top, but there are moments when those aspirations are hampered by the movie’s own obvious lack of budget.

It’s hard to say exactly who this film is for. The ultra-violence clashes with a weirdly adolescent version of the apocalypse, where everyone, even the bad guys, ride around on BMX bikes. For better and for worse, this is a foul-mouthed twelve-year-old’s vision of the end of the world.

The movie’s disjointed approach is most disappointing when you consider the character of Apple, a clingy crazy girlfriend type. This is probably not the kind of film you would look to for feminist commentary, but even so the fact that there is only one girl in the wasteland and her only purpose in the plot is to be the hero girlfriend/sidekick feels like a missed opportunity. Actress Laurence Leboeuf manages to bring an incredible amount of life and humanity into a character, but she’s fighting against a script that seems determined to keep Apple one-dimensional and cliched.

Even so, Turbo Kid is a lot of fun, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t leave me with a smile on my face. The story is silly, and the film is hardly a masterwork of cinema, but it isn’t trying to be. What it’s trying to be is a pastiche of eighties action tropes seen through the eyes of adolescence and in that respect it succeeds admirably.





Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

To hear more of our thoughts on Turbo Kid check out Episode 179 of the Human Echoes Podcast.