10 Great Indie Films From The Past 5 Years You May Have Missed

Turbo Kid is a post-apocalyptic action adventure comedy riding on the seemingly never ending wave of nostalgia for 80s pop culture. Set in an alternate 1997 in which society has crumbled and water is scarce, we follow The Kid (Munro Chambers), an orphaned teenager scavenging the wastelands and obsessing over his beloved Turbo Man comics. His life is thrown into disarray when he meets a beautiful, eccentric young girl called Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), and discovers a wrist-mounted turbocharged energy weapon in the wreckage of a plane crash. Naturally, this leads him to become Turbo Kid, s super hero forced to take on the local evil tyrannical overlord, Zeus (Michael Ironside), who controls the main water supply.

The film is exactly as bonkers as it sounds, and that is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. Just like Turbo Kids’s attempt to imitate his hero, Turbo Man, this film is an affectionate reproduction of many of the best (and worst) elements of low budget 80s filmmaking. Both a satire and an homage to films like Mad Max and Escape from New York, the film is packed full of over the top action, suspense and some impressively shocking levels of gore.

Although these homages to the cheesiest part of the 80s are by no means new, Turbo Kid pulls it off with enough imagination and genuine appreciation for its source material that it provides one of the most fun 90 minutes of indie cinema in the last half a decade.