PUMP UP THE VOLUME: Blu-ray (New Line, 1990) Warner Archive
Director, Allan Moyle tapped ‘then’ heartthrob,
Christian Slater for the role of a juvie-anarchist in Pump Up The Volume
(1990) – a sort of ‘serious’ counter-culture Ferris Bueller’s Day Off/Talk Radio wannabe meant, superficially, to consider itself 'deep' in all its goofy and naive teenage rebellion. Even the original poster art - carried over with a few minor touch-ups to this Blu-ray cover art, has Slater looking introspectively into the camera. Problem - Slater's alter ego never exhibits such heights of faux incredulity in the actual movie. No, instead, both he and Moyle quickly digress into the sort of convoluted cinematic gumbo from whence bad TV movies of the week are made. The picture’s loosely
scripted anti-capitalist/anti-conformist mantra is old hat – and worse,
virtually dead in the water, practically from the moment the pop tune soundtrack
kicks in under the main titles and our anti-hero, Mark Hunter (Slater) decides that the best way to entertain the limited audience tuning into his pirate
radio broadcast is to simulate acts of uncontrollable male masturbation,
complete with squishy noises and an aggressive slapping of the flesh (no, not
that appendage), with Hunter, yowling into his microphone, as though to be absorbed
into one continuous and epic orgasm. This is what is known as fooling the world.
If only Christian Slater were not of the jester class in Marxist clothing, these moments might
have been fraught with the kind of tasteless slap n’ tickle humor afforded a John
Landis comedy from the late 70’s. Transposed to the tail end of the 1980’s – a decade,
well-known, and even more fondly regarded for its lack of political correctness
– the demonstrative Hunter is not a progressive, but a dinosaur from this outspoken
era, fast fading into the late 20th century rear-view. And Slater,
despite giving a mostly credible performance, cannot help but fall into that trap
of thinking too well of himself, never to assimilate entirely
into his character. One senses a glance in the mirror is the only aphrodisiac
Christian Slater needed to completely get off once the cameras stopped rolling,
Hunter’s total disregard for the audience to whom he is peddling his wares, and
Slater’s own mega-ego, further discounting the few who actually did pay for the
privilege of sitting in a darkened theater to experience this drivel first-hand.
Pump Up the Volume gives one a brutally ballsy
headache almost from the outset, not because its one-note premise – cocky teen taunts
the status quo from the relative safety of a makeshift broadcast bunker in his
parent’s basement – is fixed, but rather, because Slater appears to be pissing
bullets in his sleep, and, all over Moyle’s lowbrow/high concept screenplay,
further devalued by Walt Lloyd’s C-grade cinematography – lit in lurid hues
that neither elevate the mood of the piece nor emerge as a serviceable addendum
to our story. In retrospect, Pump Up
the Volume plays like an irritated tome from a spoiled sport aspiring to be
Cecil B. DeMille. Herein, I am referring to Moyle – not Slater – whose feature debut,
1980’s Time Square, was taken away from him by producer, Robert Stigwood
after the two clashed over artistic differences. And Moyle, a failed novelist
who took an entire decade to claw his way back to another directing assignment
with this picture, and, whose subsequent efforts have been spotty at best, with
such forgettable fluff and cult crap as The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag
(1992), Empire Records (1995) on which to have ‘built’ a (choke!)
career, seems to be taking out his frustrations vicariously through his alter
ego – Mark Hunter. For certain, Moyle wrote the part without Christian Slater
in mind – his screenplay, garnering the attention of Toronto-based, SC
Entertainment whose distribution deal with New Line Cinema specified an already
‘established’ actor to be cast in the lead, someone who could play unutterably
sexy, yet demonically cruel at the same time. For this, Moyle wanted John
Cusack who, mercifully, turned the part down. Cusack had more sense – and talent
– than for this. But Slater was not only available, but rather desperate to
partake, and, after a first interview with Moyle and his producer, Sandy Stern,
was immediately hired.
Slater does do the whole ‘split-personality’ thing
rather well, by day, flying under the radar as the introverted and friendless high
school nerd who regards his yuppie parents, chain-smoking Marla (Mimi Kennedy)
and gangly, Brian (Scott Paulin) as total idiots, and, by night, assaults his
listenership with a litany of four-letter harangues, railing against anything
and everything, intermittently to pause from his total disregard for conformity
by pretending to whack off for the microphone. Difficult to see Mark Hunter as
an anti-establishment crusader when Slater’s evolution of the character builds
to little more than a disgustingly harmless and navel-gazing tyro, belligerent in
his fool’s garb, feigning to be thoroughly obsessed with sex and death. Again,
we might be seeing too much of the director’s own dissatisfaction with his
stalemated career and life – cresting on the fringes of Hollywood’s hoi poloi
without ever being invited into the real/reel party. Cecil B. DeMille, he ain’t!
So, the fictional Hubert Humphrey High is actually a version of the Montreal
school where Moyle’s sister taught. Apparently, Moyle wanted a ‘tap instructor’
to hone Slater’s dancing skills for the impromptu and celebratory gyrations he
performs after his faux jerk off. But Slater bucked this suggestion in favor of
his own ad-lib, about as appealing as a break-dancing chicken after someone’s
taken an axe to its neck.
Our story begins with a montage of mixed tapes under
the main titles and a pan across the moonlit rooftops of a lazy Phoenix suburb,
with Mark’s disembodied voice marking time as one of the disillusioned and
self-entitled teens who thinks the entire world has gone to shit. As Mark is
otherwise fairly spineless in his interaction with his peers, he takes out his
aggression on his ineffectual parents. Mom thinks he is one unhappy kid with
their recent move to this small town. Dad just wants him to get an after-school
job. Not a bad suggestion, this. Alas, the established house rules are, if Mark
maintains his grade point, the folks will just leave him to his own accord. Now,
this is how axe murders, rapists and child pornographers are born. Mercifully,
Mark’s greatest deviation is spewing his bitterness on his after-hours pirate
radio station, using Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ as his lead-in
anthem. By day, Mark avoids his peers. By night, he invades their air space, ironically,
as the voice of ‘reason’ in a world he alone has perceived as having gone
insane. As a lot of Mark’s assessments about his school and community strike an
indelible chord, it isn’t long before the entire teen population are getting
together to listen and take heed of his episodic rants, to run anywhere from 5
minutes to 5 hours, depending on his mood and displeasure.
For some time thereafter, the true identity of Mark’s
radio persona, ‘Hard Harry’ (a.k.a. Happy Harry Hard-on) will
remain a mystery until fellow student, Nora Diniro (Samantha Mathis), through a
bit of amateur sleuthing, confronts Mark the day after one of their peers,
Malcolm Kaiser (Anthony Lucero) is ‘inspired’ by his broadcast to commit suicide.
In reply, Mark – as Harry – implores his listeners to face their problems
instead of surrendering to them. Somewhere in radioland, overachiever, Paige
Woodward (Cheryl Pollack) decides this is the moment to denounce her own
various achievements by cooking her scholastic and sports medals and awards in the
microwave. Bad idea, as it explodes, injuring her. Meanwhile, other students begin
to act out their aggressions, motivated by Mark’s rage to explore their own
cathartic release. Things reach a critical point, forcing Arthur Watts (James
Hampton) of the FCC to investigate. Hubert Humphrey’s principal, Loretta Creswood
(Annie Ross) is discovered to have expelled ‘problem students’ – a.k.a. those
with below-average standardized test scores, to artificially inflate the
district's averages, while still keeping their names on the roll to retain
government funding - a criminal offense. Realizing the brevity of his movement,
also, the FCC is closing in on him, Mark dismantles his basement bunker, loading
the transmitter into his mom’s Jeep. Now, he begins his final broadcast, pursued
by the police and the FCC while Nora drives around. As the harmonizer used to disguise his voice fails,
Mark elects to broadcast this farewell address in his own voice. Nora drives
the Jeep into a mass protest of students. The police catch up and arrest them.
However, as Mark and Nora are being led away, Mark’s call to action serves as a
beacon for other voices in the crowd to be heard, the final moments suggesting a
grassroots movement of pirate radio stations cropping up all across the fruited
plain.
Pump Up the Volume isn’t a particularly ambitious
movie. Nor is its weak-kneed freedom of speech ‘message’ particularly
engrossing. If you are going to tell the tale about an angry young man exposing
the hypocrisies of life, he had better have something more refined and
revealing on his programming schedule than a few tart-mouthed anti-everything
diatribes about the obsolescence of his white privileged middle-class life. This movie just spins its own wheels for an
interminable 105-minutes that seem to run twice as long with half as much to
sustain our interests along the way. By
1990, Christian Slater was established as something of an ‘art house’ fav among
teenage girls. And while cute and cuddly isn’t Mark Hunter’s thing, Slater’s
own charisma precedes the more volatile and vicious outbursts of his alter ego –
watering them down just enough so we don’t hate Mark Hunter outright for being
spoiled and insincere. Pump Up the
Volume was a box office dud when it opened on August 24, 1990, barely
earning $1.6 million its opening weekend, with a wide release in 799 theaters.
That number would eventually balloon to $11.5 million in North America. The
picture would also win several ‘art house’ awards and go on to have a cult
following. But the failing here is in Moyle’s screenplay and direction, neither
capable of evolving or even maintaining the story’s basis, before fast-tracking
with a leaden thud to a perfunctorily resolution.
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of Pump Up The Volume
is a quality affair with a few minor caveats. One or two scenes exhibit
fleeting edge enhancement, inexplicably to appear and then vanish. Color
saturation is solid. The image has a late-eighties dated quality that bodes
well for this time capsule, augmented by a rather thick patina of grain. Contrast
is excellent. Blacks are deep. Daytime exteriors exhibit a slightly blown out quality.
But I suspect this is baked into Lloyd’s cinematography and not this mastering
effort. The 2.0 DTS makes good use of the pop-tune infused soundtrack. Dialogue
occasionally sounds slightly muffled and over-dubs are rather obvious. The only
extra here is a theatrical trailer. Bottom line: Pump Up the Volume is not
a great movie. It undoubtedly will continue to find a renewable home in the
hearts and minds of indignant youngsters, yet to realize the whole world does
not revolve around them and frustrated to discover, no matter what they do, it
likely never will. Pass on this disposable little nothing. Not for children.
Very little here for adults. Burgeoning teens will likely find a kindred spirit
in Mark Hunter. Sad, actually.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
1.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
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