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AssAULT bu PRECINCT 13 (18) 91min
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A - L-v‘. ll; T lyi{::, BMX BANDITS (PG) 87min .0.
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“Come on Judy. Do your stuff.‘ Up until halfway through BMX Bandits, it has been a lightweight kids' romp. Then suddenly an era ends. Nicole Kidman performs the most thinly veiled metaphor for sex ever seen on a BMX. A few bunny hops later and her chums PJ and Goose are agog. Before that moment her character Judy has been a bit of a drag - fired unfairly from her Saturday job, she’s bemoaned the lack of a proper BMX track in her suburb of Sydney where she’s also tangled with the pair of goons from whom she's inadvertently nicked some ‘hot’ walkie-talkies. Yet here she suddenly is, being sexy and liberated and for five minutes generally carrying on like she’s in Pretty in Pink. Although the kids ultimately triumph over the useless henchmen, it‘s too late. innocence has already sloped off to the graveyard and is about to start slugging from a bottle of cider.
BMX Bandits is the film in which the Children‘s Film Foundation-style movie dies. Y‘know the kind - something like Seal Island, which is given the following pithy description on the TV Cream website: ‘Conservation area is breeding ground for seals. The kids like the seals. Some men want to shoot them and sell the pelts. The kids save the seals. Everyone’s happy.’ It’s Enid Blyton on screen. In 1967 the Children’s Film Foundation turned out six of these for screening at Saturday morning matinees throughout the UK, along with five serials. That year kids bought 17m tickets to see them in rotation with older films. In its annual report the OFF instructed its filmmakers to always ‘have in mind from the conception of a film the important opportunity . . . which he has to influence young minds in a desirable direction.‘
Astonishingly, this mora|-instruction-as-entertainment was subsidised first by the industry itself and then by the government. Cunningly, their patrician tone was always disguised by the fact that initially the children were never believed by adults and had to undertake their quest alone. However. the kids‘ apparent rebellion was always understood by the adult filmmaker and their rowdiness was always given a final sanction by the adults in the film when they caught the baddies. In the 505 one of the most popular places to view the CFF‘s huge output was the Odeon Children‘s Clubs. Its members had to swear the following oath: ‘I promise to tell the truth, to help others and to obey my parents.‘
Watching Kidman as Judy now, it‘s clear that it wasn‘t just TV that contributed to the demise of these films. BMX Bandits came out in 1983, the year after ET. Spielberg had successfully colonised the inner child and, for better or worse, Hollywood had begun to merge the children's market with the adult market. Furthermore, in the next few years, John Hughes would convince every one else that they were in fact 16 years old. BMX Bandits was left as a high water mark for the kids'/grown-ups’ flicks and a beachhead for the career of Kidman. (Tim Abrahams)
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