BMX Bandits rewatched – debut of a young freewheeling Nicole Kidman

When Australian cinema experienced a genre renaissance in the 1970s and 80s, inundated with a wave of films later dubbed “Ozploitation”, director Brian Trenchard-Smith was right at the heart of it.

Pulpy classics The Man From Hong Kong (1975), Deathcheaters (1976), Stunt Rock (1978), Turkey Shoot (1982) and Dead End Drive-In (1986) encapsulate many of the movement’s attributes: its flair for colour and bling, uncomplicated story lines, and high-octane energy and movement.

The latter qualities are important factors in Trenchard-Smith’s BMX Bandits (1983) which saw him detour from niche adult fare – typically involving action and/or horror, and typically low budget – to mainstream family entertainment.

The film, described by Quentin Tarantino as Australia’s equivalent of The Goonies, follows a trio of whippersnappers who whiz around Sydney on BMX bikes, foiling the plot of criminal masterminds while careening through suburban locations: streets, plazas, piers, a cemetery and even waterslides.

After a montage of close-up shots – the donning of helmets, kneecaps and wristbands; the mounting of bikes and flicks of feet on pedals – PJ (Angelo D’Angelo) and Goose (James Lugton) crash into a young mall trolley collector, unfairly fired by a snarky boss.

She is a frizzy-haired, rosy-cheeked, pale-skinned fellow freewheeling (note the wheel) spirit named Judy, played by a 16-year-old Nicole Kidman in her first feature film role. The three band together and chance upon a secret stash of special walkie talkies, that happen to play an important part of a nefarious plan hatched by a local criminal outfit.

They foil the plan, but not before goons track them down and chase them across the city. The final confrontation is a magnificent slab of fairy floss action: after a people power confrontation in which dozens of BMX comrades arrive to pelt the villains with flour, PJ and Goose chase a truck down a coast-hugging road and leap on top of it, leading to a crash that results in foam bubbles oozing everywhere.

BMX Bandits is the ultimate would-have-got-away-with-it-if-it-wasn’t-for-you-meddling-kids movie. At one point a villain actually says “hyuk hyuk hyuk”.

Trenchard-Smith paints his characters as a mixture of daredevils and crime-solving sleuths, who enforce the values of an adult world while rebelling against it. Like The Three Investigators, The Hardy Boys, The Goonies, Scooby-Doo and even Home Alone, Trenchard-Smith’s day-glo adventure plays with the idea of kids as both problems and solutions: the outcomes of their adventures enforcing the status quo (criminals are brought to justice) by temporarily disrupting it (the kids break the law, or at least upset authorities, in order to reprimand the bad guys).

Spatially, Trenchard-Smith treats the film like a humongous colourful playground, stuffing it full of playful shots and unconventional angles. It was shot by Australian cinematographer John Seale, who went on to win an Oscar in 1996 for his work on a very different film: The English Patient. Particularly, it’s the low angle takes – of cars, bikes, tracks, pavement, tyres – that gives BMX Bandits a whooshing, careening, burnt bitumen on-the-ground immediacy.

A feast of kitsch and gaudy colour, set to the tune of an 80s synth soundtrack, the film plays like a G-rated music video. And Trenchard-Smith maintaining a buzzing energy throughout.

BMX Bandits hangs together with a sense barely controlled mayhem: perhaps, the logical result of when a specialist in low budget genre flicks plays with assets afforded to them by a mainstream family movie, and doesn’t surrender their style.