Turbo Kid Is the Blood-Soaked '80s Homage You Can Stream on Netflix
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of weekends walking down the street to my neighbor’s house to watch “tough guy movies.” “Let’s watch a tough guy movie!” he’d say when we got tired of playing Nintendo games and then he’d pull out Mad Max, RoboCop, Predator, or anything with Jean-Claude Van Damme—‘80s or ‘90s action movies that were perhaps low on nuanced themes and character development, but were high on campy dialogue and overflowing with ridiculous gore. If you had similar childhood habits—or simply love the sound of a bloody, campy, geeky post-apocalyptic actionfest—then 2015’s Turbo Kid is a movie for you.
Turbo Kid takes place in an alternative 1997 where the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but where you still might find a nice Rubik’s Cube or View-Master below a row of severed heads. The hero, simply named The Kid, spends his days reading comic books, killing mutant rats, and scavenging the ruins of civilization for goods he can trade for water. One day he finds an odd woman, Apple, hanging out with a corpse who slaps a tracking bracelet on him and decides they are best friends. "How do you get it off?" he asks. "Oh, you just don't,” she says with a smile. Soon The Kid is teaching her the rules of scavenging, and Apple is teaching him about what the other side of the wasteland is like: “It’s kinda gray. And dusty.”
The wasteland isn’t all fun and games though. The water supply is controlled by Zeus (Michael Ironside), a one-eyed Mad Max villain pastiche who forces people to fight to the death, then throws their corpses into his water purifying machine. Opposing this villain, and his masked henchman Skeletron, is Frederic, a Clint Eastwood-ish cowboy famed for his arm-wrestling abilities. This isn’t wimpy normal arm wrestling though. The loser’s hand might smashed into a burning toaster or even a flaming blender blade. ("Around here we like to do things with a little more joie de vivre,” Zeus announces when he reveals the latter.) Soon, The Kid, Apple, and Frederic will have to join forces to stop the bad guy and save the day.
With a soundtrack drenched in synths and a plot stitched together from old actions films and comic books, Turbo Kid fits right into the current 1980s nostalgia wave. It’s like Stranger Things if the Duffer brothers only watched Mad Max films and were less interested in Steven Spielberg smaltz than Paul Verhoeven-style gore. Turbo Kid isn’t a movie that takes itself too seriously. Instead, it goes all in on campy fun, groaner one-liners, and huge spurts of blood. Turbo Kid is hardly the action masterpiece like the actual 2015 Mad Max reboot, Fury Road, but it’s a fun homage that you can’t deny has real “joie de vivre.”
