• Written and directed by Albert Pyun
• Starring
  • John Stockwell
  • Michael Dudikoff
  • Lisa Blount
  • George Kennedy
  • Don Murray

Time spent watching an Albert Pyun movie does not contribute to your life. It only leaves you that much closer to the inevitable end of your days.

Unless, of course, you watch them in order to write sarcastic and occasionally amusing reviews at great length. Then they’re just more fertile grist for the mill. Go me!

“Yessir, our motion picture careers certainly look bright!”

Radioactive Dreams was only Pyun’s second movie, after his fairly well-received (for him) debut The Sword and the Sorcerer. Little did future producers and audiences know that Pyun complained bitterly about how his “artistic control” had been compromised by the producers behind that film, and that as he was given freer and freer reins in successive projects, those features which earmark “An Albert Pyun Film” would come more and more to the fore.

At least, as schlockmeisters go, this second film was sufficiently different in concept that he didn’t get pegged as a one-trick pony. (Compare his output to, say, the output of select Italian directors: “Hey, this time, instead of a South American cannibal tribe, let’s make a movie about a Central American cannibal tribe!”) And as concepts go, it’s not bad: A pair of boys locked in a bomb shelter for fifteen years with nothing but old pulp novels to read, emerge into a post-apocalyptic wasteland steeped to their eyeballs in hard-boiled cliches. There’s certainly potential in that logline, so much so that a modified version of it was turned into the moderately entertaining comedy Blast From the Past a couple of years ago.

But this is Albert Pyun we’re talking about here — the man who could make a week of hedonistic debauchery a grey, lackluster experience. And yes, I AM stalling. Because this movie wasn’t really a movie I want to relive in the retelling. The things I do for you people…

Um… Are those mussels growing on the side of his head?>/p?

Okay. In the beginning in 1996, our two waifs are playing in the woods near where a couple of crooks (one of whom is George Kennedy) are hiding out or stowing loot or something at a convenient bomb shelter. Then a mushroom cloud goes off on the horizon, and the crooks kindly swoop the two boys into the shelter.

Fifteen years later, our heroes have grown up into Phillip (John Stockwell) and Marlowe (the American Ninja himself, Michael Dudikoff). And yes, character names ARE going to be that blatant all the way through; Pyun is after all the man who, five years later, named all the characters in Cyborg after guitars. You can bet the departed souls of the classic private eye novelists sure appreciate this “homage.”

Anyway. They’ve finally found a way to break out of the locked bomb shelter, so they give each other haircuts, get themselves some stylin’ (circa 1940) threads (from where? DON’T ASK) and head out in their classic car that doesn’t mind having sat unmaintained for fifteen years.

The Militant Daughters of Ronald McDonald.

The world is the expected arid desert landscape, but it doesn’t take long before the two boys run across (almost literally) a blonde being chased by mutants. The girl is Miles Archer (Lisa Blount, and yes, I did warn you about the character names), and despite Marlowe’s instant infatuation, she’s not exactly as she appears. Before she leaves them at a nearby working phonebooth in the middle of nowhere (???), she accidentally lets two red keys fall out of her pocket. These keys are the plot’s McGuffin, as helpfully explained in the title card before the opening credits; they belong to the single nuclear warhead that wasn’t launched in the civilization-frying exchange. Whoever holds the keys, therefore, has the most powerful weapon in the world.

The boys soon run into another hapless waif, and this time it’s Phillip’s turn to be smitten; she’s Rusty Mars (Michele Little), sort of a hippy chick as filtered through ’80s pop culture. In fact, everyone they meet has a different pop-cultural gimmick. They rescue Rusty from a couple of nine-year-olds in leisure suits (are juvenile actors allowed to drop THAT many F-bombs in their dialogue?), and she leads them on to Edge City, a collection of bombed out buildings populated by enclaves of greasers, cannibal hippies, New Wavers, etc. And all of it is accompanied by one of the most annoying post-Flashdance/Footloose synthpop soundtracks of all time. (We even get a three-minute music video segment that might entirely sap the will to live of an unprepared audience.)

Again — there’s potential in the concept. But Albert Pyun seems congenitally unable to craft a cohesive storyline, or use the tools of cinema to tell one effectively, so what we get here seems so disjointed as to verge on the surreal. The mood shifts from ostensibly comical to ersatz pathos at the drop of a hat; impromptu speeches from character to character are interspersed with a bad copy of a hardboiled voiceover delivered by Phillip, sounding more like a morose teenager trying to impress with his “depth” than the tarnished angels of the golden age of private eyes. And where else are you going to find a director so enamored of slo-mo that he shoots the entire five-minute climactic action scene that way?

“Chilly? No, why do you ask?”

Of particular note is Michael Dudikoff as Marlow, the goofier of the two heroes (as opposed to John Stockwell’s Phillip, the whiny naysayer). It’s one of those odd little twists of fate that Dudikoff shot another movie that same year that got him more recognition, American Ninja. The odd quirk of fate is that his American Ninja character is defined by his stolid reserve, whereas Radioactive Dreams shows that there was some talent for physical comedy lurking in the boy. Not that Pyun knew how to draw it out of him; thanks to clueless direction, Dudikoff simple comes across as a bad Buddy Hackett imitation with hormones.

As often happens in Pyun movies, there is a single scene that stands out as being good — if, that is, it were a part of another movie in which it didn’t seem so out of place. Here, it’s the scene in which Phillip is gently seduced by Rusty, and though he really doesn’t want to show it, he’s scared out of his wits. It’s a well-done scene, very honest and almost poignant, and it desperately wants to be in a better movie than this. (In case you’re wondering, no, Phillip doesn’t end up getting any; it turns out that Rusty is simply baiting a trap for the local cannibal club.)

As you can guess from his position in the credits, George Kennedy does show up again toward the end. However, I had a really hard time following exactly what his position in the plot was; I was too busy keeping up the one-man chant of “End! End! End!” I think it may have been more a matter of Pyun saying, “Dammit, I paid for him, I’m going to use him!”

But down these mean streets two dorks must go…

You may reasonably be thinking, from the foregoing description, that this was ostensibly a comedy. Honestly, I can’t tell if it was meant to be or not. There are scenes which are pretty obviously meant to be humorous, but they uniformly fall flat from heavy-handed execution. And the serious parts are SO ploddingly serious that they tend to dispel any awareness of satirical intent.

When the end result of a production turns out to be a very bad movie, the writer can often say, “It’s not my fault; the director screwed with the script.” And the director can in turn declare, “It’s not my fault; you should have seen the script they gave me to work with.” But when the writer and the director are the same person — and that person just happens to be Albert Pyun — you’ve got no choice but to believe that this is pretty much how he intended the movie to be. So what, then, can we make of the fact that, after this, he’s directed a full thirty-three movies?

Truly, the world in which that can happen, the world in which we live, is stranger and more frightening than any radioactive wasteland.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 26
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 20
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Hilary Shepard (“Biker Leader”) played “Hoya” in the DS9 episode “The Ship,” and “Lauren” in the episodes “Statistical Probabilities” and “Chrysalis”