Rad Movie Review
Brad Sturdivant
March 18th, 2023
I spent most of my childhood overseas on a military base in the 80’s and the video offerings at the time were slim. For the most part, my favorite childhood movies were the big blockbusters like BACK TO THE FUTURE, ET, etc. that everyone loved. I did have a few more obscure favorites like DARYL, MONSTER SQUAD and CLOAK AND DAGGER, but one movie that always eluded me was the 1986 BMX racing film RAD. To be clear, I knew the movie existed because I knew kids that had seen it, but the one video store in driving distance didn’t have it and I had no other way to track it down. I attempted to track it down a couple of decades later, but it has never been easy to find on home video, until Vinegar Syndrome decided to give it a limited 4K UHD release. So at the age of 44, I sat down to watch a movie I was dying to see when I was 8 years old.
And this may sound ridiculous, but I loved it. No, it’s not a good movie and it has some really bad acting and very bland, stereotypical villains, but it’s a great time capsule into the 80’s and it works well as a sports movie. The film is simple enough; our hero is an amateur BMX racer named Cru that dreams of competing in a big, professionals-only BMX tournament. He gets his chance when the tournament sponsor holds an amateur qualifying race and he’s helped along the way by the beautiful Christian (Lori Loughlin). Against all odds, Cru fights his way to go up against the best in the world. Yep, you know where this is going, but it’s still a lot of fun getting there.
I mentioned that the performances are bad and unfortunately, they really are. Future ‘Full House’ and college admissions scandal star Lori Loughlin is probably the brightest light in the bunch. She’s joined with several familiar 80’s faces, such as Jack Weston (Max Kellerman in DIRTY DANCING) and Ray Walston (Mr. Hand in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH). Oh, and Cru’s mom is played by Talia Shire, who is probably the person most responsible for bringing this 4K disc to market. RAD was directed by Hal Needham, who gained fame from directing the CANNONBALL RUN films and not much else.
I find myself struggling to defend my enjoyment of RAD because the more I turn a critical eye to it, the more problems I see. But I feel like that can be said about a lot of these types of 80’s films. For what it’s worth, RAD hits very familiar beats, but does a great job of capturing the BMX craze of the early to mid 80’s.
4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY REVIEW
Video: Remember that RAD doesn’t appear on home video very often and when it did, it wasn’t exactly HD quality. So to get a 4K presentation this pristine is incredible to 80’s movie fans everywhere. This transfer has had more care and effort put into it than movies that made 100x at the box office and it really paid off. This video transfer looks incredible considering how old the film is.
Audio: No complaints on the audio front.
I was not provided a review copy of RAD so I won’t go into detail on the special features. There are three commentaries and a handful of great featurettes.
