Movie Review: ‘Turbo Kid’

I can still vividly remember walking the few blocks from my childhood home to the local mom-and-pop video store, a crappy little concrete building where the clerks didn’t care that I was far too young to be taking home films like The Road Warrior and Repo Man and Robocop. And if this were another dimension, Turbo Kid would no doubt be placed on the shelf alongside those classics.

Set in post-apocalyptic Canada in the year 1997, the film follows an orphan who lives underground, emerging only to scavenge the wasteland for relics from the former world that he can sell to a local junk peddler in exchange for fresh drinking water. The Kid (Munro Chambers) is also something of a pack rat, squirreling away artifacts in his bunker that he finds particularly interesting, including a collection of Turbo Rider comic books – one of which sparks the interest of a mysterious girl named Apple (Laurence Lebeouf).

Apple is an odd duck, charmingly enthusiastic and hopelessly naive, and able to glean excitement from the most mundane tasks imaginable. At first, her seemingly inexhaustible energy is little more than a hindrance to The Kid’s way of life, but it doesn’t take long for a friendship to develop between the two wasteland wanderers, even as they run afoul of Zeus (Michael Ironside), a local warlord with an army of henchmen and an iron grip on the water supply.

The ensuing battles boast an absurd amount of violence and gore, particularly once The Kid discovers a Mega Man-esque arm cannon capable of reducing attackers to puddles of quivering goo. Turbo Kid‘s trio of directors – François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell – deserve a tremendous amount of credit for sticking to the film’s 80’s-inspired roots: all of the decapitations, blood spatters and dismemberments are created with practical effects, and the film is better for it.

Chambers does a nice job acquitting himself of the teen heart-throb image he forged on Degrassi: The Next Generation, and Ironside gleefully chews scenery while dispatching foes in ridiculous fashion (there’s a hilarious sequence involving an exercise bike), but it’s Lebeouf that completely steals the show here. Her portrayal of Apple is so vibrant and sincere that it’s impossible not to fall in love with the character – even though she exists in a Mad Max-inspired romp where souped-up cars have been replaced with BMX bikes.

Turbo Kid is precisely the type of film that should be seen with an audience. A raucous crowd is the perfect companion to this bizarre and hilarious little genre offering,which explains why it took home the Midnighters Audience Award at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival. It’s a little too silly at times, but its charms far outweigh its faults, and whether you catch the film on the big screen or at home via your favorite VOD outlet, one thing you can count on is that there’s nothing else quite like Turbo Kid.