MOVIE REVIEWS : A MELTDOWN OF FUTURISTIC ‘DREAMS’

Like all too many films these days, “Radioactive Dreams” (citywide) is an intriguing premise in search of a real story. Writer-director Albert Pyun (who did the chilling “Dangerously Close” earlier this year) has lots of inventive ideas rattling around in his head, but his movie has the slap-dash air of a Melrose Avenue hipster: It’s all dressed up with no place to go.

The film’s heroes are a pair of young survivors of nuclear war who’ve been locked away since childhood in a bomb shelter. With only detective novels to school them, they rejoin the 21st Century outfitted like a pair of extras from a Warner Bros. gangster film. Eager to live out their high-spirited, pulp fantasies, the boys dub themselves Phillip (John Stockwell) and Marlowe (Michael Dudikoff), sport wide ties and fedoras and talk like hard-boiled gunsels.

They’ve got something everybody wants--a set of keys to the only surviving nuclear missile. That prompts a series of adventures that lead the duo to Edge City, a seamy, violent town of the future that looks like a cross between “Mad Max’s” Bartertown and the Renaissance Faire, with everyone on bad acid. Here we see a 21st-Century version of the mean streets, as the guys attempt to elude Hippie Cannibals, punk femme fatales (with names like Miles Archer) and even a roaming band of Disco Mutants, played by a pair of foul-mouthed tykes dressed in John Travolta-style ice cream suits.

Pyun gets a few laughs out of the town’s post-nuclear atmosphere--the local saloons all have signs saying “Sorry, no mutants allowed,” while the local paper is the Daily Blast. But the thin story line quickly collapses into silliness as Phillip and Marlowe’s bumbling private-eye routines go stale--Dudikoff, a credible action hero cast here as a “ mondo nerd,” delivers his lines in a high-pitched squeak, as if he’d taken hits of helium before each take.

Apparently, Pyun never figured out a way to end the film--he just turns up the decibels, torturing us with a cascade of third-rate, Pat Benatar-style yowling. But at least he could’ve dreamed up a more engaging plot. By having everyone in pursuit of the keys, the film turns into one long, laborious chase scene. It might’ve made more sense to have our heroes lose the keys early on, then spend most of the film trying to recover them. That would have given the movie two elements it sorely lacked--suspense and more solid character appeal (by allowing the guys to develop their gifts as amateur sleuths). As it stands, “Radioactive Dreams” (rated-R for profane language and violence) simply offers us the future as a cartoon strip full of pop-culture bummers.