dir. Albert Pyun
USA, 1984, 94 mins
August 8, 8:30PM
Castle Cinema
After an atomic war Phillip Hammer and Marlowe Chandler have spent 15 years on their own in a bunker, stuffed with junk from the 40s and old detective novels. Now, 19 years old, they leave their shelter to find a world full of mutants, freaks and cannibals. They become famous detectives in the struggle for the two keys that could fire the last nuclear weapon.
Albert Pyun draws on the pop cultural ocean to consistently bring us cinema that can only be described as imaginary. Concocting hazy dreams of half-remembered tropes, lurid boxart and hyper violence (with a handful of pet interests sprinkled throughout his filmography), Pyun’s body of work could have only been spawned from the world of VHS home entertainment. Radioactive Dreams is no exception (it’s in the name); what other filmmaker could make something so charmingly earnest out of the pop-cultural detritus of post-Cold War America, with allusions to all manner of influences both in homage and plagiaristic tones. Understanding that the dawn of the “movie buff” was on its way, Pyun paved the way for high concept, immediately recognisable tape-bound narratives to rot the brains of 14 year-old comic obsessives, a storm drain of pulp fictions that are rendered very genuinely apocalyptic and crude.
This screening will be preceded by an intro.
- Kit Ramsay
starring —
