Best of Frightfest: ‘Turbo Kid’ Dir. François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell

Best of Frightfest: As the twentieth anniversary of Arrow Video Frightfest approaches, we at team THN take a look back at some of the best and brightest films that have screened over the last two decades. Today we grab our gnome stick and talk about Turbo Kid.

In 2015, we were thrown into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where a sadistic overlord controls all. There, we met a hero with an affinity for vehicles who, along with his female ally, fight for their own future in the seemingly hopeless landscape that they call home. Funnily enough, I’m not talking about Mad Max Fury Road, I’m talking about the delightfully mad Turbo Kid. 

We follow ‘The Kid’ (Munro Chambers), a comic-book obsessed orphan surviving across the wasteland on his trusty BMX. When his new friend Apple (Laurence Labeouf) is taken by the forces of the evil Zeus (a brilliantly cast Michael Ironside), ‘The Kid’ must take inspiration from his favourite comic book hero, Turbo Rider, to save his new friend from an uncertain fate. 

Very much taking George Miller’s original Mad Max series in its cross-hairs, Turbo Kid is a demented retrograde exercise in low-budget Sci-Fi film-making, framing its action in an alternate 1997 where the world has gone to shit. From there, it uses its setting and genre playbook to essentially do just that: play, showing just how much fun you can have without a Hollywood budget to back up your loftier ambitions.

Turbo Kid more than fits in with our current preoccupation with everything retro, particularly when it comes to looking back at the cinematic offerings of both the 80’s and 90’s. Arriving a whole year before Stranger Things made that obsession mega-mainstream, Turbo Kid feels more like a genuine article of affection, as well as pastiche, revelling in the allowances that its throwback design offers when it comes to shooting things on the cheap. 

Turbo Kid is one of those micro-budgeted flicks that looks back to the practical days of effects and manages to construct some truly impressive visuals in the process. That is particularly the case when it comes to its cartoonish sense of violence, with many moments of over the top gore clearly coming from a place of cheeky playfulness (who doesn’t love a good blood squib, or two, or a hundred?), while its junkyard costuming and weapons more than fits the tone of the world it establishes. It’s all in the service of an affectionate piss-take of the cheap video nasties and post-apocalyptic, synth-driven landscapes that populated 80’s sci-fi cinema. But it doing so, it also creates its own equally bonkers and fascinating world, one populated with quirky characters delivered by two stand-out performances from its young leads.

Turbo Kid is a sandbox adventure that makes the most of it means to deliver something that feels like an 80’s fever dream that’s woken up and eaten a bit too much sugary cereal. It is the kind of film that Frightfest loves to embrace, the low budget indie that shows great potential even within its limited budget and constraints. It is why the festival is such an exciting time for spotting emerging talent, with Turbo Kid embodying those values with a manic genre-loving glee. 

Arrow Video Frightfest returns for its twentieth year on 22nd August 2019. Full details about the event can be found on the Frightfest website.