![]() ![]() It’s unforgettable enough in its wonderfully misguided audacity that it alone catapults this ripe slice of American cheese into the canon of Reagan-era cult classics. Some movie’s cults can be pinned down to a single scene. Now that I’ve seen a scene of just that I’m still not convinced that bicycling boogying is anything more than a bizarre fiction created solely for one singularly ridiculous scene in one singularly ridiculous movie. I did not know such a concept even existed, and for many years I dated a woman whose very expensive passion was for dressage, which is essentially “horses dancing all fancy-like.” Yes, I knew all too well that competitive horse dancing was a thing, and also that it is very expensive to own horses, yet I never even imagined that two people could dance with each other while riding bicycles, that the bicycles themselves could boogie, as it were. I must admit, dear reader, that in the forty two years I’ve been on this planet, the phrase “bicycle boogie” has never once rattled around the old brain bone. ![]() Like the ornery septuagenarian, Cru is a hit with the ladies, and fellow BMX fanatic Christian Hollings (Lori Loughlin) is feeling the Bern, if I might abuse this metaphor even further. He’s the people’s choice, a man who could easily have ridden the American public’s famous love of Jews and Socialism, and Jewish Socialists, to victory in the Presidential elections if only he hadn’t been the victim of an evil conspiracy to stop him.Ĭru is as natural on his bike as Bernie is delivering a fiery stump speech to his army of devoted followers. Rad is pretty much the story of the 2016 Democratic Presidential race in allegorical form. The plucky underdog wins a qualifying race and makes it to Hell track where he faces off against Bart Taylor (Bart Conner, gold medal-winning Olympics gymnast and husband of Nadia Comăneci), the face of the sport and a man the corrupt BMX establishment, as embodied in the corpulent, sweaty form of the wonderfully named Duke Best (Jack Weston) not only wants, but needs to win in order to keep his, um, corrupt, evil bicycle empire afloat. Rad isn’t a movie with stunts: it’s a stunt showcase that shakily assumes the form of a motion picture.Ĭru lives to ride and rides to live so he lucks out when the loser little small town that he calls home improbably becomes the home of Hell track, a prestigious BMX event whose winner takes home a sweet one hundred thousand dollar prize and a Chevrolet Corvette. In Rad, those stunts involve vehicles with two wheels rather than four but the essence remains the same. You hired him because you were making a movie with stunts and no one was better at handling stunts than the world’s greatest stuntman with the possible exception of Jackie Chan, who, come to think of it, may deserve the title of world's greatest stuntman even more than Needham does. You didn’t hire Hal Needham because you wanted a film to explore the complexities of human nature or expose the underlying crueltly of capitalism. So it’s fitting that the movie was directed by Hal Needham, possibly the greatest stuntman of all time and a man who leveraged a painful lifetime of suffering for stars into a directorial career that included such smashes as Smokey & The Bandit, Hooper ( which I covered for Forgotbusters), Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II and Smokey & the Bandit 2. Rad is less a motion picture than a threadbare delivery system for bike stunts. And amazing and awesome in its terribleness. That’s certainly the case with 1986’s Rad, a BMX exploitation movie that has attracted a cult following for a very good reason: it’s fucking amazing. God bless you weirdoes, you really seem to have a sense of what kind of kitschy ephemera I will dig. I appreciate that almost all of the choices so far have been on-brand. ![]() Even when I haven’t necessarily enjoyed the movies I’ve written about for the column, like the dire big-screen cinematic sitcom/Gabe Kaplan vehicle Nobody's Perfekt or Police Academy 3: Back in Training, I’ve nevertheless gotten a lot out of the experience, if only because it’s allowed me to satiate my curiosity about some exquisitely random shit. But it’s also given me a lot of fun stuff to write about. It’s single-handedly allowed my monthly Patreon haul to increase rather than decrease every month, as was the case before I introduced it. I feel doubly, or even triply blessed by this feature. It’s the column where I give readers/patrons an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time one hundred dollar pledge. ![]() Welcome to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0: Payola with Honor. ![]()
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