Radioactive Dreams

MOVIE #1,441 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.14.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM I think you could make the case for any film made between 1985 and 9/11 being about “the end of history,” though this is certainly an early entry that's more closely entwined in the Cold War era, but I still think there's a case. And I'm gonna lay it out, in as painless a way as possible. (There is, frankly, SO much going on here that you could tie it to any number of concepts of ideas and not be wholly wrong or right — it's very easy to see why this fact alone led many critics to instantly dismiss it.) In Justin Decloux’s book, fittingly titled Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, he writes “Radioactive Dreams is a goofy ‘80s comedy, a post-apocalyptic adventure, a ‘40s detective pastiche, and a musical all wrapped into one high-concept package.” 1

You could add on any number of adjectives and describers. Basically, there is pastiche and then there is this. It's one of the most original movies I've ever seen when I step back to really look at it. Starting with the character names of our two leads: Philip and Marlowe, which methinks is a reference to cinema’s Philip Marlowe, the hardboiled private eye who originated on the pages of author Raymond Chandler's novels and short stories in the early 30s. The character jumped to the big screen in the 40s with multiple incarnations, most notably Humphrey Bogart's performance of Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946), and he never looked back. There has been a consistent stream of Philip Marlowe TV shows and movies ever since continuing right up to 2022 with the Liam Neeson feature, simply titled Marlowe. There have been many notable actors to take the reigns over the years including James Garner, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum. But a couple of names you won't find on any list are John Stockwell (Philip) and Michael Dudikoff (Marlowe) in Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams. And I'd like to change that.

The chopped up repurposing of the name Philip Marlowe, like a lot of Pyun's choices at first glance, might seem like nothing more than (at best) a cute nod or (at worst) cheap poaching. But I actually think it's the first of many suspiciously smart creative decisions. There’s so many directions you can go with the look and feel of your cinematic apocalypse, and Pyun essentially landed on ALL OF THEM. When Philip and Marlowe emerge from a bunker they’ve been in since they were kids, they’re greeted by a landscape out of time and out of place: everywhere is either the Mad Max mutant-infested desert or the grimy streets and seedy underbelly of a cyberpunk New Orleans. They’re greeted by characters who all seem to have adopted highly specific personality traits from each decade of the Cold War: we see foul-mouthed children dressed somewhere between 50s greasers and 70s pimps, hippy madmen, 80s hair metal freaks and all stops in between. Enter our two heroes who have spent a life in isolation: with their only entertainment the pulpy crime novels of an earlier era, they’ve emerged with readymade Chandleresque private dick personas, yet one more layer away from the hellish reality of this nuclear 1985.

Whether or not you fully buy into the concept of “the end of history,” a phrase popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man which argued that, with dissolution of the Soviet Union in ‘91 “humanity had reached not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Radioactive Dreams obviously predates this, and others have argued that 9/11 is a better demarcation point for the concept, a moment from which humanity (at least in the Western world) fractured in a way that changed everything and ushered in a new stanza of “the end of history.” It's in this mode — which Mackubin Thomas Owens, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, called “the end of ‘the end of history’” ²— I'd like to posit Pyun's film as a truly prescient work, predicting many trends of the 21st century.

Owens, a hawkish former Marine Colonel, wasn’t really discussing culture when he coined that phrase, but it’s still apt. Nostalgia for anything and everything of the preceding century (with a focus on the content consumed by the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers) became a predominant force in entertainment. The acronym “I.P.” now rolls off the tongues of everyday people as if intellectual property was simply an esteemed genre, something far beyond a legal term for conglomerates. Furthermore, simply take a broad look at mainstream fashions: when an individual isn’t clearly aping the style of an even earlier age, there’s not much difference between how somebody looked in 2004 and how they appear here in 2024 (contrast that, in your mind, with someone from 1965 vs. 1985).

Enter Pyun’s vision of a post-nukes wasteland in the waning days of the Cold War: it’s a tonal nightmare. With nothing much left to say about the state of humanity (what’s the point of life in the face of near mass-extinction?), and no real desire to create or innovate (stylistically or otherwise) because of it, we’re left with splintered factions, stealing and/or parroting all the bygone ways of being. It’s a simple notion but so effective. This is how you end up with two adults who were spiritually born in the 1910s running into a couple of deranged children who are the living embodiment of mini-Tony Montanas…

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t critique the actual movie. By the second appearance of a monster, which I can only describe as a giant metallic dog crossed with Godzilla…


…it finally dawned on me that the movie is a hot mess. But the genius lies in the fact that it doesn't know it's a mess: it believes in itself, and reassures to the audience that it’s OK for them to believe in it as well. For nobody ekes every last ounce out of a budget to shoot action like Pyun. These fantastic sequences are less of a bridge to connect an otherwise batshit plot and goofy acting, and more like the heaping spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Because you might not know you need Albert in your cinematic diet but you do.

There is a sordid backstory of the creation of this one as well. Needless to say, Pyun’s vision wasn’t fully realized. That it’s still so damn fun and entertaining is a minor miracle, honestly. In a denouement for the ages, the movie ends with our boys doing a synchronized old-timey dance routine called the “post-nukes shuffle” in front of a stunned crowd of armed punks (in order to subdue them/win them over!). The Soviet Union wouldn't collapse for another half-decade or so, but this was the real end of the Cold War…



FOOTNOTES
1. I will try not to reference Decloux’s excellent book TOO often but as it says on the back cover, it IS the first (and still only) book on Albert Pyun ever written.
2. SOURCE

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Radioactive Dreams is a 1985 post-apocalyptic science fiction-comedy film written and directed by Albert Pyun and starring George Kennedy, Michael Dudikoff, Don Murray, and Lisa Blount. The names of the two main characters are homages to noir detective fiction icons Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler and Mike Hammer. The film has achieved cult status and has been screened in several cult revival programs around the world. It was released on July 1, 1985.