The spirit of ’86 lives in this oddball action flick. It’s great movie junk food if you’re sympathetic to its bold nonsense and synthesizer score. The setting is a post-apocalypse 1997, years after everything apparently went to shit under Reagan and Gorbachev and now life has gone full Mad Max complete with dangerous wastelands and freak show bad guys—as well as lots of 80s artifacts scattered among the sand and human remains. Our hero is a teenage loner, family long gone to dust, who gets off on whatever old comic books and cock-rock cassettes he can scavenge. He meets a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl. He also finds a superhero costume with a working wrist laser attachment. It all leads to a fight against the usual resource-hoarding, murderous villain. Blood pours by the gallon and body parts fly all over the screen. The carnage reaches grand cartoonish splatter on a Sam Raimi level. There’s not much under the surface except for lots of sincere love for 80s genre films and all that make them campy and fun, but that’s enough. Its aspiration seems to be a recreation of the kind of movie that a 12-year-old back in the VHS days might have zeroed in on at the video store and NEEDED to see. Writer/directors François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell want nothing more than to make that kid happy.