Turbo Kid
Director: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell
Writer: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell
Cast: Munro Chambers, Laurence Leboeuf, Michael Ironside, Edwin Wright, Aaron Jeffery, Romano Orzari
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
Seen on: 22.9.2015
[Review by cornholio.]

Plot:
It’s the future. The year is 1997. The world is a postapocalyptic wasteland. The Kid (Munro Chambers) lives alone in a bunker, scavenging to find things he can trade against food, water and comic books. The world around him is terrorized by Zeus (Michael Ironside), but so far the Kid has managed to stay under the rader. Then he meets Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) who simply enters his life and doesn’t go away anymore. When Apple gets snatched by Zeus’ men, the Kid teams up with the heroic Frederic (Aaron Jeffery) to save her.

Turbo Kid is an extremely sweet and fun film that is a love letter to 80s retrofuturism which makes it immensly enjoyable.

Turbo Kid doesn’t really have a surprising plot, but that is just right for this kind of film. And they do manage to sidestep tropes that are severely annoying. Apple could have easily become a manic pixie dream damsel in distress but they manage to both explain her bubbliness and make her much more than just a vehicle for the Kid’s character development. In the end you want to be friends with her and I really want to see more movies with Laurence Leboeuf now because hot damn, she was good.

Equally impressive but in a very different way was Edwin Wright, who plays evil henchmen Skeletron. He wears a mask the entire film but he has such an impressive command of his body language that you never need to see his face anyway. He manages to convey a rich interior life, menace and comedy all at once.

The rest of the cast is far from bad (surprisingly for this kind of trash-on-purpose production), but those two were just particular standouts.

I also loved that the film, quite contrary to the usual postapocalyptic films where everything is grey and brown and beige, doesn’t shy away from colors. Especially with and around Apple, but als The Kid and his bunker get to be colorful and bright and very 80s.

So you got a great cast who give characters that could have otherwise fallen flat a lot of life. You got an 80s aesthetic transplanted into a future world. You got a surprising amount of gore that is morbidly funny. You generally got a warm, sweet sense of humor. I’d say that is the perfect recipe for a great film, and Turbo Kid proves that I’m damn right about that.

Summarizing: It pays to spend money making a film that looks like it doesn’t cost much at all. And it definitely pays to spend money to see it.