When Girls watch Rad
Photograph by
The tagline for 1986’s cult-status film Rad reads: “It’s going to take a lot more than skill for Cru Jones to conquer the toughest BMX challenge in the world. It’s going to take a miracle.” The same could be said about your chances of finding a copy of Rad that isn’t a fifty-dollar VHS bootleg.
As Rad star Bill Allen reports on his website – where he now tries to milk his cult-icon status by charging to autograph Rad memorabilia – the film was a top-ten rental for two years. I suspect the renters were mostly scads of suburban boys, taking turns every weekend at the corner-store while their sisters swooned over Dirty Dancing.
According to a recent virgin viewer (my roommate), Rad’s BMX-ballet scene, where a sparkling Christian Hollings (Lori Loughlin and a wigged-out Martin Aparijo as her stunt double) seduces Christopher “Cru” Jones (Bill Allen) to the tune of Real Life’s Send Me An Angel is “so much better than anything in Dirty Dancing.”
The lightning-speed plot sees the town council debating whether or not to shell out for the small American town (which looks a lot like Cochrane, Alberta) to host the world-class freestyle BMX race Helltrack. Within a week, the factory-sponsored riders are parading through town and the hero, Cru, has improved his paper-route timing by five minutes. Clearly, he’s ready to win.
I’m quick to look with suspicion on any boy-culture film that came out of a time and place that excluded my personal participation. Now that I am old enough to care less, I can appreciate that there’s a great close-up shot of side-boob in the parade scene; I can admire the zebra-print full-body spandex that one of the BMX-groupie girls wears, and I can admit that Cru’s mom is (let’s face it) a hot mom — especially when she’s angry at Cru for skipping his SATs in order to race. (Perhaps he should have listened to his mom: Bill Allen, who was 22 at the time of filming, is in theatres now playing the much-coveted role of Reporter #2 in Astronaut Farmer.)
Finer girl-oriented details didn’t escape my notice either. Christian demonstrates the efficacy of 1980s hairspray, maintaining perfect hair despite riding around, doing tricks, and falling into water several times. Cru’s initial crush, “Katie,” refuses to be impressed by his BMX skills; a situation with which I am personally familiar. Meanwhile, Cru’s little sister Wesley (Laura Jacoby) provides the better female role-model in the film, forging signatures like a banshee, fighting like a gremlin, and swearing like a sailor. Go team.
Not yet available on DVD in North America, sixteen thousand fans have signed an online petition to bring Rad back from VHS-deterioration-induced death. Most of them are dudes, and I’m cool with that. It was the ’80s after all, and I’ll always have Patrick Swayze.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Newsvine
Facebook
Yahoo
