![]() ![]() 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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