’80s nostalgia is a strange and curious thing. Take Hal Needham’s Rad, a movie about BMX racing originally released in 1986. I never got to see Rad in the theater despite being a BMX-obsessed ten-year-old (i.e., the target audience). As I grew older, I’d occasionally remember that, oh yeah, there was a BMX movie that came out when I was a kid, but even when I saw Rad on a video store shelf, I never seriously considered renting it.
But here we are in the year of our Lord 2020. Rad has been restored and remastered in 4K and will be released this July on streaming platforms. And now that I’ve seen the trailer — which is full of appropriately radical BMX racing and stuntwork that’s set to some inspiring, training montage-worthy hair metal — I can’t think of any movie I want to see more. My inner ten-year-old is beside himself with joy.
Rad will become available on AltaVOD on July 10 followed by other on demand platforms on July 24. It was previously released as a limited edition (and now sold out) Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome. Via Screen Anarchy.