Loosetooth Reviews: Pump Up the Volume (1990)

There are some films which could only have been made in a certain time, The Defiant Ones could only be made in a pre-Civil Rights era, Dr. Strangelove could only be made in the height of Cold War paranoia, and Pump Up the Volume could only be made in a post-Eighties/pre-internet world.

“Guess who? It's 10 o'clock, do you care where your parents are?”

Mark Hunter has just moved from New York to a sleepy suburb in Phoenix, Arizona and he’s not happy about. By day he’s a shy and awkward teen, by night however he’s Hard Harry, a shock DJ on his own pirate radio station. Originally his parents bought him a CB radio to talk to his friends back home, but when he couldn’t get anyone he just started talking into the airwaves…and people started to listen.

Hard Harry quickly becomes an underground sensation with his combination of vulgar humour, alternative soundtrack and open honesty, that and his constant digging into his school’s unsavoury practices. While the faculty are becoming increasingly annoyed by his influence over the student body, things escalate when a student kills himself after talking with Harry on the show.

While Harry becomes the voice of teenage angst and student unrest, Mark is becoming overwhelmed by the public support for his ‘Message’. Things become more uncomfortable still when a fellow student figures out that Harry & Mark are one in the same.

Mark tries to pull away from his Harry persona, on more than one occasion deciding to quit the show. It’s the events of the day though that urge Mark to speak out, to talk about the suicide, a gay student ridiculed by his peers, and his school’s practice of suppressing freedom of expression and hounding out students with low grades and undesirable traits.

“All the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks”

Pump Up the Volume could only exist in a post-Eighties world. The Eighties were a decade of money & excess, fashion was at it’s most extreme, skateboarding, grafitti & videogames were now part of popular culture, and kids had grown up on cartoons that didn’t treat them like simpletons. The youth of the Eighties were far more switched on to the ways of the world than their parents had been in their youth.

Nowadays it’s easy to voice your opinion, to speak out against injustice, to rally people together, we now have a wide variety of social media platforms to make ourselves heard, and express who we are. But Pump Up the Volume exists in a pre-internet world, while it did exist it wasn’t ‘a thing’ until the late Nineties and wouldn’t be commonplace until the creation of smart phones, where anybody can ask ‘R U alright Hun?’ or tell you they’ve been to the gym at any point in space and time.

The soundtrack of Pump Up the Volume is just as important as the free speech and youth revolt, it’s a perfect precursor to the musical revolution of the nineties. Soon the Grunge movement would sweep the world, and Nirvana would knock Michael Jackson, the biggest star of the Eighties, off the top of the Billboard charts. The soundtrack also includes numerous hip-hop tracks of more dubious content than likes Of MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice that Eighties radio audience would have been used to, music that while still not radio friendly is very much common place nowadays.

“Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up”

While Pump Up the Volume didn’t receive much attention when it was first realised, only making 11.5 million at the box office, it’s since gained a lot of love holding a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.2 on IMDb. It may not be underrated, but it’s certainly underseen and underappreciated.

Pump Up the Volume is a punk movie for the people who grew-up in a post punk world, or too young to take notice.

Have You watched Pump Up the Volume? Let me know in the comments below