Turbo Kid (2015), a weird, gory, goofy, quirky, post-apocalyptic wasteland B-action movie.

MY CALL: Just watch the trailer. If you really need to ask if this movie is for you, it probably isn’t. MORE MOVIES LIKE Turbo Kid: Kung Fury (2015), Manborg (2011), The ABCs of Death 2 (2014; W is for Wish), and various Tokyo Shock movies.

From the start, this movie is clearly an ultra-low budget flick that doesn’t seem overly concerned with acting quality. In fact, Michael Ironside (Extraterrestrial, Total Recall) gives perhaps his most ridiculously hammed up performance I’ve ever seen as some sort of evil tyrant in this post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland. Not one second of this film takes itself seriously and thank God for that. It’s part 80s action B-movie and part 80s videogame in theme and score, embracing its lunacy and running with scissors at top speed.

The Kid (Munro Chambers; Godsend) is a quirky young scavenger scouring the wastelands for trinkets to entertain himself and goods to trade for survival resources. He meets a bright-eyed, awkwardly idiosyncratic and perhaps mentally challenged girl named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) who takes an instant liking to him…with a dash of stage-5 clinger craziness and equal parts adorable naiveté.

This attack legit kills someone…just saying.

This movie taught me a few things. For example, duct taping a lawn gnome to a baseball bat creates a dangerous weapon called a gnomestick. I also learned that the best way to settle a post-apocalyptic dispute is by arm-wrestling over hot toasters. Oh, and be wary of evil robots!

The adventure takes hold when The Kid finds Turbo Rider dead and dons his armor and turbo blaster power glove, which hilariously turns its target into explosions of gooey mess.

Written and directed by newcomers Yoann-Karl Whissell, Anouk Whissell and François Simard, this film feels rather innocuous until the gore graces the screen. Dismemberment accompanied by spewing red corn syrup and abundant gore-slathered chunky gushings beg us for forgiveness for the sinfully non-existent budget. And you know what? It works. I like watching torsos get quartered, blood geyser eruptions and bicycle-drawn disembowelment.

The connections to Fury Road‘s (2015) water tyrant and Soylent Green (1973) were well-intended, but didn’t fit my fancy nearly as much as the 80-90s videogame references to Zelda and the Nintendo PowerGlove. And despite its utter nonsense–best characterized by liquefying people and low-speed BMX chases–I “think” I enjoyed this. The combat violence was tedious at best (probably meant to be funny–but not so much for me), but I found it salvaged by the ridiculous gore.

There’s a pretty vast array of stupid-themed bad guys, saw blades and projectile buzz saws.

I find myself questioning the genre of this movie. It’s ultra-gory nature has made it an instant favorite to horror gorehounds, but it’s more of a campy action B-movie. I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s zany and bloody and funny, and that does it for me. If you enjoy pure cinematic lunacy, then this is probably for you, too. I will see that among movies like this, this is more on the forgettable side and I definitely have no desire to ever see it again. But I might be interested to see what these filmmakers do next, preferably with a bigger budget.