Radioactive Dreams

This fulfills the criterias to be a cult classic, something to love OR hate for everyone. I belong to the first category: 2 kids growing up in a nuke shelter with a large collection of detective novels deciding to be the post apocalyptic worlds first dicks, The Atomic Dicks! Fastpaced wachy post apocalyptic tong-in-the-cheek comedy. Irresistible. B-movie queen Lisa Blount pops up in this weird mix and singer Sue Saad gives a few nice songs like the excellent title song "Radioactive Dreams", the soundtrack certainly deserves to be released. Great acting, excellent photography and score. It is very low budgeted, but every last penny is up there on the screen and stretched well beyond its limit, just as it was the case with director Albert Pyun's "The Sword And the Sorcerer". This movie stands up to repeated viewing. 7/10

Gosh golly, Marlowe, i surely do love this film. All right, so it's another tidbit of trashy 80s post-apocalyptic fluff, but it's really the cream of the crop and has a great soundtrack, fun sets and costumes, tongue-in-cheek writing and acting, cannibalism, swing dancing, love, innocence, mayhem, violence, and plenty of silly 50s references... Philip and Marlowe (ha, ha) leave the bomb shelter after basically their whole entire lives, and emerge into a radioactive wasteland, to search for their fathers. This ranks right up there with "Rockula," "Bill and Ted," and "Pretty in Pink" as the cutest 80s kitsch films. Okay, so maybe i'm a little hung up on Raymond Chandler and Humphrey Bogart and that whole genre, so i enjoyed this a little more than someone who didn't grow up in the 80s and who never saw "The Big Sleep" more than 20 times. But i still recommend this as rollicking fun for everyone who loves mutant new wave girlies on motorcycles etc.

The movie itself is not particularly good. B-movie-esque with a few laughs, and the otherwise simple plot is told in a rather incomprehensible and messy way. The acting is pretty bad and the cutting almost hilarious. There are definitely many better movies to watch before this one, unless you have a thing for 80s kitsch (I do).

The movie does however shine in one particular area; the soundtrack. I have watched (or listened to) the first 3 minutes on repeat for a good while already. Hard-punching 80s synth wave / new wave epicness bathed in reverb - I love it!

I have been a sort-of fan of this film for a long time, as it was an attempt (no matter how misdirected) to like two of my favorite genres of film. This is a strange movie, but about as good as it could have been, given the budget. However, I must warn any potential viewers that you MUST be prepared to suspend a significant amount of disbelief...

The ultimate problem is that it cannot seem to decide if it is a comedy, or more serious film. It begins with sort of a comedic premise, it works well as a strange sort of slapstick comedy (with Michael 'American Ninja' Dudikoff turning a surprisingly good performance). It is two kids who were locked in a fall-out shelter by their 'fathers' the day of the nuclear war. All they are left with is pulp detective books and so they model themselves on the characters therein. They then enter the world after the bomb and thier innocence is confronted by a series of unpleasant challenges and betrayals (some that are surprisingly un-funny, but not bad). They then become 'real' film noir style, jaded anti-heroes and confront the baddies.

Then the film ends in a dance number...

OK, it's wierd, but I honestly believe that anyone who has an appreciation for strange film will really enjoy this movie. It is cute and kind of innocent and relatively entertaining. It is worth at least a watch.

Pyun's ambitious effort is well-made but extremely lacking in plot and character development. Essentially, it is a half-baked post-apocalyptic comedy about two Hardy Boys-esquire young guys (John Stockwell and Michael Dudikoff) who see the world for the first time. They run into various zombies, 80s bondage/biker chicks, a genuinely creepy butcher, and several other zany and morally ambiguous characters as they search for their father.

Like a lot of Pyun's films, it doesn't take any effort to level the ground for the audience. It has flashy ideas and camera maneuvers and some decent action, but it was hard to understand what was going on. Or maybe it was hard to understand that the movie WAS going on without any real plot lying underneath its surface. By the end I was giving up on it because there was no interesting conclusions or character accomplishments. If it were trippier and filled with more complex weirdness it could have been more watchable, but it still needed better characters and more fun.

There is a dance number at the end that is pretty amazing though . . .