BMXB-icon

Brian Trenchard-Smith is one of Your Humble Reviewer’s favorite direc­tors of exploita­tion fare.  The Man From Hong Kong, Stunt Rock, Escape 2000 and Dead-End Drive-In are all top-shelf exam­ples of his approach: he takes exploita­tion premises, gives them an epic visual style you wouldn’t expect from this style of film­mak­ing and pushes the film’s exploitable ele­ments as far as the bud­get will allow.  These films siz­zle with the kind of excite­ment you only see in the work of a direc­tor who is truly enjoy­ing himself.

So where does BMX Bandits fit into the Trenchard-Smith oeu­vre?  To be hon­est, it takes its place on the sec­ond tier.  It’s unlike much of his other work in that it is designed for chil­dren, right down to its ‘G’ rat­ing.  The plot is the kind of sim­ple premise you could have seen in a 1970’s live-action effort from Disney.  P.J. (Angelo D’Angelo) and Goose (James Lugton) are two teenage bike enthu­si­asts who run into trou­ble when they crack up their bikes in a lit­tle acci­dent and need money for the repairs.  They make friends with Judy (Nicole Kidman!), another bike-crazy teen who needs money for own bike but just lost her job.

Thankfully, the trio’s luck bright­ens when they stum­ble across a cache of hid­den walkie-talkies and sell them to the local kids.  This gets them funds nec­es­sary to fund their BMX mania but it also causes them to run afoul of the walkie-talkies’ owner: The Boss (Bryan Marshall) is a crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind who was plan­ning to use the devices in a heist.  He dis­patches two goons — Whitey (David Argue) and Moustache (John Ley) — to get the walkie-talkies back by any means nec­es­sary.  Cue prat­falls and bike-stunts galore…

The end results are rea­son­ably divert­ing but minor stuff for the schlock fanatic.  The script is rather hum­drum, lack­ing the imag­i­na­tion and the goof­ball flair nec­es­sary to rise above its for­mu­laic nature.  It also makes the mis­take of plac­ing its biggest stunt sequence before the finale — the end stuff is fine but feels lack­ing in com­par­i­son to the big set­piece that closes out its sec­ond act.  Also, because it is a film made for chil­dren, it sim­ply isn’t capa­ble of delv­ing into the kind of out­ra­geous­ness seen in other Trenchard-Smith films.

However, what remains is still good Saturday-matinée fun.  For starters, the cast is like­able and game when it comes to ful­fill­ing the film’s mod­est dra­matic needs.  Kidman shows she had camera-ready appeal at an early age and co-star Lugton has a skill for deliv­er­ing one-liners in a dryly witty fash­ion.  Marshall makes a respectable bad guy (he has a fun mono­logue near the end that he impro­vised for the scene) and Argue is amus­ing as the wack­i­est of the goons, clearly hav­ing a lot of fun with a scene where he imper­son­ates a detective.

However, the most impor­tant ele­ment of BMX Bandits is Trenchard-Smith’s ener­getic approach.  He broad­ens the appeal of the film by treat­ing the bike stunt scenes like car chases and adding in fun beats you wouldn’t nor­mally see in a kid’s film, like a fairly intense bank heist and a chase through a ceme­tery that is styl­ized like a hor­ror film sequence.  He also uses the Cinemascope frame beau­ti­fully in col­lab­o­ra­tion with future Witness and Rainman cin­e­matog­ra­pher John Seale: the two man­age to pack each sequence with vivid pri­mary col­ors, inter­est­ing com­po­si­tions and plenty of action.  A puls­ing synth-rock score adds a final layer of fun kitsch.

In short, BMX Bandits doesn’t qual­ify as top-shelf stuff in the world of Trenchard-Smith but it’s fairly engag­ing nonethe­less, par­tic­u­larly for those who have an 1980’s fetish or nos­tal­gia for kid flicks of years gone by.