Rad

This movie is a cult favorite among anyone who spent their summers riding their bikes or skateboards, and featured a killer soundtrack, not to mention a respectable cast considering the obviously low-budget. Very hard to find on VHS and not likely to warrant a DVD release this is a seldom seen piece of 80's movie history. Whatever anyone else might say I liked this film and anyone I have talked to that remembered it liked it too.

I can't say I've ever been apart of the BMX crowd, but that certainly doesn't stop "Rad" from delivering the goods. What's really amusing about this movie is that it doesn't take long for its weaknesses to somehow become strengths, and that's all part of the charm. It's familiar (The Karate Kid, E.T.), it's bizarre (was that a school dance or a disco scene?) and I get a smile from seeing Canada as small-town America. But this is the kind of underdog story you can't help but like, and that's not even covering the movie's greatest weapon: the music. Farnham's "Thunder In Your Heart" is every bit the '80s time capsule that is "Rad".

It's a fun movie.

7/10

There's an old saying that "you can't go home again", but thanks to the movie Rad, I can go home anytime I want to. It was filmed mostly in my hometown when I was a kid (all but Helltrack itself, which was set up in Bowness Park in Calgary), and re-watching it now brings me back to how excited everyone was at the time. In the movie the town was called Cochrane, and was in some unknown state. In real life, the town is.....you guessed it, Cochrane, which is just outside Calgary, Alberta. And the local kids really were into BMX biking; I remember my godfather's son making a half-pipe as a shop project, and then not being able to get it through the shop door.

The high school in the movie really was pre-renovation Cochrane High. The Cobra logo on the gym wall is the real Cochrane High logo (I graduated as a Cochrane Cobra, as did my dad before me). I remember the school freaking out over whether the movie crew would be able to pull off the BMX Boogie scene without permanently damaging the gym floors. The school ended up converting the gym to a library and music room and building a new gym on the opposite side of the school, if I recall correctly thanks in part to the location fees paid.

The ice cream shop where Cru catches up to Christian is called McKay's and was Cochrane's one and only tourist attraction at the time. Cru's workplace, the Main Street Snack Bar, was real. It's been also been a café, and a Chinese food restaurant over the years, but it's there. Lucky Penny Pizza was really Cochrane's best (and for a long time, only) pizza place. The building in the background when Cru jumps the car during the parade even housed my mom's office.

Best of all in terms of hometown connection, the house that Cru's family lived in in the movie wasn't a set. It was a real house, and it was actually the first house my parents lived in after they got married.

Cochrane had a population explosion shortly after this movie was made, and has grown to the point that most people who've seen Rad would never recognize the town now. For example, there's no longer an empty field opposite the sawmill, and the field Cru and Christian ride into on the hill above the town is now home to a huge subdivision of condos. It's not a small town anymore, and the small town feel is long gone, but when I watch Rad I see my hometown the way it was when I was a kid, and it makes me smile.

I can't even count how many times I've watched this movie. Such a fun trip down memory lane. Takes me back to cruising the neighborhood with my friends on our BMX.

This film is called Rad, and that's exactly what it is: A truly radical experience. I admit, I did hear about this movie from the Nostalgia Critic's review of it. Then, when I heard the epic song "Break the Ice" and when I heard about how much of an audience it attracted, I decided to check it out... Right at the perfect time, summer of freshman year. I was in for a kick-ass experience.

The film's opening is awesome. It's nothing but dudes on BMX bikes showing off their tricks. Just amazing! After the opening, we get our main character, Cru Jones. He reminds me of Rocky, an underdog who is determined to get something done, despite the odds against him. It's funny to mention Rocky, because Talia Shire (Adrian from Rocky) is in this movie. We also have Aunt Becky from Full House in this movie. Man, what a babe! In the end, everything turns out great.

This movie sure knows how to deliver. It's marketed as a BMX movie, and that's what it gives us. Awesome. It's also inspirational. Before I saw this film, I saw riding my bike as a dead phase of my life. Now, after I saw the movie, I can't get enough of my bike. I like going outside on my bike and trying to do tricks and stuff. It sucks how this movie was only released to VHS. We need this film on DVD. Official DVD, which means that the homebrews out on the Internet don't count. Well, the folks at InHD came to the rescue and released a version of this movie with DVD-like quality, and it was awesome. Notice: I said "was", which means that every copy of this version that was uploaded to YouTube have now been taken down thanks to a false copyright claim by Warner Bros., even though they don't own the movie. Luckily, I caught on early that these were being taken down, so I snagged a copy and saved it to my SD card. Just look at us fans, the extremes we have to go through to get this film out on DVD.

Don't look at this film as a piece of '80s that was only a fad, look at it as Rocky on bikes. Yeah, the music is pretty dated, but that shouldn't matter today, since it seems like all modern movies rely on music from the past to use in their films, but who could blame them? Bottom line, this film was great then and it's great now.